My visual production articulates on the interaction between
photography, digital media and painting in order to deal with the
identity matter to represent the family, as the individual in a
migratory process converging the change as a concept of the
media and the esthetic strategies. The basis of my work is the
questioning of the image: considering the painting as the original
discipline absorbed in the historical coordinates (from that
discipline as well as that of my surrounding) to slide to another
field, one that will drive me to the photographic appropriation and
the digital manipulation, in order to experiment the disarticulation
and restructuration of the image.
This is how my artwork/photographs, paintings and drawings
through a digital intervention in a post production, refer to
modern history painting phases.
In this way, the development of my work behaves as a
contemporary equivalent of the original relation between painting
and photography, when this one imitated the composition and
representation forms of the painting (the position of the persons
and, for example, the background of the portraits). When
painting, from the abstraction, liberated the necessity of
representation and headed towards the search of its own
communicational possibilities, the photography assumed the
responsibility of representing reality.
The main principle on which this formal dynamic obtains a body is
around my family and the condition of immigrant. This is the
reason why my visual work is marked by family relations and the
ties that bind me to the story of a distant country, as being the
son of a German citizen who arrives to Chile in the ´60s,
corresponds naturally with the use of photographic material, than
as an index of a “has been” that provides me with referential
points for a particular genetic map.
On the other hand to combine old and contemporary photographs
to enter an anachronistic time-space where everything can
happen, I enter a universal and particular explosion as a sign of
the moment of transformation. Each second is a particle of an
imperceptible change but disconcerting, each second goes to the
periphery of the confusion.
The click of the camera is a permanent reference. There is a
recurrent search of identity that mutates, penetrating patterns
and cultural myths in our psyche, creating dark and hidden
spaces. As the nebula after the explosion, something dies a
possibility of being different. This is a gap between catch and
absence, original fracture.
From photography to painting.
everything changes too fast.
As you live from the media the most personal to the abyss of
change embodied in one of the most iconic postmodernist: the
shock, the destruction of the vertical parallels representatives of
the capitalism. Representing the death of ideologies. Change of
the world, collateral damage that could come in the twilight of late
adolescence.
The psychological and cultural scene is a net presentation of the
changes, by no means justified by economic or political speech,
because the truth does not matter, no longer matters.
The objects of desire are no longer the great ideologies, rather
the abyss of power. It is the technological obsession that only
leads to a sad status so quickly that there won’t be an empty
space-time to feel homesick. In this explosion is only the anxiety
of nothingness: death.
andreas von gehr-visual artist chile- avongehr@gmail.com- avongehr.cl
