One of the clear characteristics of our digital age is that in it all things, bodies even, are generally suspended from their more or less stable material substance. This increasingly spectral state of affairs is the effect of mostly invisible forces of abstraction that can be associated with the digitization of more and more aspects of human experience. We as living beings are now confronting a structural split between the substance of things and their generic, virtual double. Concretely speaking, one can point to everyday phenomena as manifestations of this unsettling development: coffee without caffeine, or food without fat, for instance, are expressive of this mode of abstraction/extraction, but also money without currency, love without bodies, and soon following, painting without paint, and finally, art without art… Pieter Schoolwerth attempts to reverse the above described techno-cultural trend with his series of in the last instance paintings, in which the stuff of paint itself reappears as supplement only at the end of a complex, multi-media effort to produce a figurative picture.
Model as Painting is the first in-depth publication on Schoolwerth’s practice. An introductory text by the artist lays out the foundations of his painting processes. The main essays by art historian Molly Warnock and critic David Geers set out to define his “practice [as] singular in its focus on language, labor, and the body’s dispersal in today’s technological landscape.” (Geers) The multi-media, figurative, and decidedly representational paintings in Schoolwerth’s “Model as Painting” series are elaborated through a unique and intensive sequence of creative phases, including digital photography, the making of collages and 3D models based on the collages, internet browsing, software image processing, printing, and finally, painting.
Softcover w/ flaps, 300 x 230mm, 232 pages, 204 color images
ISBN 978-1-7336281-2-9
