I define my task opposite to Michelangelo (not to free the form already present in the block of marble), but to press it into display blocks, to enclose it in frames, into new perspectives of meaning, layers of fear and of beauty, into unholy alliances.
An image-addict, despite all resistance always at work, a lifelong prophet — images that turn into images, people into people, events into events, ten meanings in a sequence, a universal history, “allspace in a notshall,” structures from ancient epochs, the Holy Scripture, human anatomy, battles, films, magazines — to smash the world into pieces and reassemble it, a new aesthetic grammar. The myth-bank of our time, matrices whose forces possess infinite combinatory possibilities.
I do not know what inspires me most and supplies the most associations — the painting of electrode rays on the screen that glows — images flashing against the iris — useless information, like buckshot blasts against the scalp — or the ‘platonic shadow-play’ of fire on the walls.
A world where knowledge doubles every five years, soon every three, soon every year, where truth has an ever-shorter lifespan, where lie is only another word for obsolete truth. In a world that retouches away the madness of whole peoples, to find an intersection in reality, not to be dominated by the images, but to master the images, to see connections, to take apart and recompose what I have copied into my head.
I — a split between moral imperative and total powerlessness — I let the images roll by, change the expression, erase details, shift sections, verify ambiguities, check the sketches of my research, algorithms, transformation rules, composition schemata — create mental constructions — ideograms — elements of a new-old visual language.
Image: that is the pin-up likeness of Rita Hayworth on the bomb of Hiroshima, scratch marks in the gas chambers, osmosis through the walls of our being, labyrinths newly deciphered, visual puzzles of terror, ground through the meat grinder of the brain and newly modeled, despite everything, the very essence of poetic reflection.
My works should be like a video that allows one to let the images run slowly, to pause pictures to study the details at leisure, especially since today everything is abstracted into surfaces and symbols for something else.
We live in the age of words, the language of the head. But we repeatedly see images before us, as if cut out of magazines like Life, Time, or Spiegel, photographs and motifs that give rise to the desire to find connections, to penetrate the depths of the complex causes. Therefore, I want to stretch the mimesis principle of realism far enough to describe what will come, not what exists.
Thus, I burned the Hermes mask and accepted that the 20th century reduced art to triviality — to a marginal phenomenon. As I said, we live in a new time, and have accepted Heraclitus’s ‘Panta rhei’ (everything flows).