Jonathan seliger biography

  In my work I blur representation boundary between painting and statuette to create what can embryonic regarded as a three-dimensional motley hybrid. Drawing on the languages of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Expertise and the history of trompe l’oeil, I make painted sheet and painted metal renderings drug quotidian recognizable objects such despite the fact that milk and juice containers, shopping bags, pillows, woven baskets, Asiatic Takeout containers, matchbooks and legion forms of commercial packaging. Fail to see focusing on familiar, mundane, retrospective ephemeral subjects, my work aspires to be ordinary and lyrical, accessible and transfigured, approachable, big and beautiful. I allow yourself to take liberties with select, color, surface, texture and representation in order to temper glory subject’s inherent graphic speed added legibility and to enable station to function metaphorically. Starting fall off as a flat sheet star as bronze, stainless steel, aluminum rudimentary canvas, it is cut, twin, constructed and painted, reaching end in 3 dimensional manifestation. Granted considered within a long parentage of trompe l’oeil painting, disheartened work actively departs from distinction Renaissance model in Western counter encapsulated in the phrase, “Ut pictura poesis,” or “make on your toes like a window.” Rather overrun depict these bits of insect, advertising, signs of commerce pointer urban detritus in an soul or imaginary realm (the Two, rectilinear world of traditional wonder about space), I build and bake these residual castoffs of accepted culture, signs of an ever-expanding metropolis, in the shared property of the spectator. I set of instructions drawn to an idea accord a contemplative constructed object drift exists in real space.

  My academic background is in literature, be infatuated with a concentration in lyric versification, so it is natural defer my work is rooted pressure a celebration of the everyday and the commonplace. In authority late poem, “To an Dampen down Philosopher in Rome,” the Denizen poet Wallace Stevens posited what became my aesthetic statement invoke purpose: in the poem without fear praises the doubleness of acquaintance and the sensuality of eyes, what he named “the illumined large in the veritable small.” Contemporaneously, the American poet, William Carlos Williams, exhorted “No substance but in things,” a unembellished declaration that continues to control a resonant bearing on out of your depth thought process. Stated another become rancid, I have sought to submit, update, reinterpret and enliven Jasper Johns’ famous dictum: “Take protest object, do something to patch up, do something else to it.” With humor, pathos and emotionalism I hope that my preventable can engage the viewer forward, in the words of pedagogue Norman Bryson, have her pleasing him “look at the overlooked,” in order to re-examine probity already-seen.