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My work explores an ongoing interest in how painting can negotiate a position vis-à-vis photography and a state of increasing technological mediation. This project has often pushed my practice into more interdisciplinary pursuits, into art historical and photographic research as well as into broader explorations of visuality. And though each body of work can often look contradictory and the visual idioms disparate, I see each as a dialectical step in an ongoing attempt to encircle a quintessentially modern experience—an experience defined by image-making technologies that index, reflect and contour our subjectivity. |
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“My project also strives to represent while staging the limits of representation and admitting to the clumsiness and historical freight of its medium.”
Peter Rostovsky, Beach in Fog, 2010. Oil on panel, 64 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Philosophical Enquiry
Peter Rostovsky
My work explores an ongoing interest in how painting can negotiate a position vis-à-vis photography and a state of increasing technological mediation. This project has often pushed my practice into more interdisciplinary pursuits, into art historical and photographic research as well as into broader explorations of visuality. And though each body of work can often look contradictory and the visual idioms disparate, I see each as a dialectical step in an ongoing attempt to encircle a quintessentially modern experience—an experience defined by image-making technologies that index, reflect and contour our subjectivity. For me, this historical development articulates the very crux of perception and representation, and it is what I feel painting at its most reflexive can both reveal and perform.
Though many of my projects have utilized sculpture, digital imaging and installation, I still regard myself primarily as a painter –and worse yet, as an oil painter. Recognizing the limits and historicity of this medium, I use painting as a tool of philosophical inquiry as well as a vehicle for lyrical reflection. Recently, my work has taken on a more allegorical and melancholic turn in reaction to political and economic events. This shift reflects my attempt to re-route photo-based painting, to set it against itself and to use representation to address those things that are secular yet unrepresentable. Lest this sounds theological, at its broadest, this is a project that still seeks the painting of modern life—a rendering of experience. Yet conceding the complexity of its subject, this project also strives to represent while staging the limits of representation and admitting to the clumsiness and historical freight of its medium.
It is perhaps a foolhardy project to represent the world through painting, which has abdicated so many of its representational claims to technology—to photography in particular. Yet it is a project that still holds promise in its ability to insist on its subject purely through the obstinacy of labor, through myopic and at times obsessive focus. It is, in short, a project of insistence and of metaphor, of a faulty and material translation pledged to an increasingly translated and immaterial world.
