Molly Warnock: We first met in 2016, in the run-up to your Model as Painting exhibition in Berlin.1 Since then, you\u2019ve created multiple successive bodies of new work. Each deploys a specific combination of digital and analog processes to address what you\u2019ve characterized as distinctive \u201cforces of abstraction\u201d in the contemporary world: the internet and digital technology. Each group nonetheless involves a specific modification of your working method. Why is it important to you that your way of making paintings should continually change?<\/p>\n
Pieter Schoolwerth: There are different ways you can change. I like to think that the change in my work is more structural than stylistic. Stylistic change leaves the basic structure intact and just swaps in different coordinates. It doesn\u2019t require that the viewer slow down and understand how something developed as a worldview.<\/p>\n
I think changing one\u2019s work on a structural level is a political act. It\u2019s connected to the desire to continually try to find freedom in the stuff of paint, while questioning traditional notions of what a painting can be. It involves a certain restlessness, a material struggle with a specific set of tools.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I have a passionate interest in keeping painting relevant. If young people aren\u2019t inspired by going to museums and looking at paintings, maybe they\u2019d rather design a game or create content for social media. Painting could fall into an irrelevant artisanal category of nostalgia culture.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m continually looking at my life and asking, what can I do to make painting be of this moment\u2014not 1948, 1971, or 2012? I want the work to express what I\u2019ve experienced in the last few months or year.<\/p>\n
Warnock: More than in any of your projects to date, the paintings you are making right now can almost appear initially as large gestural compositions in the tradition of lyrical abstraction. Yet each is obtained through a decidedly hybrid method\u2014by feeding a much-smaller, rapidly improvised painting through a laborious process involving photography, CG effects software, printing, and the manual re-introduction of paint. What is at stake for you in this multimedia reimagination of painterly gesture?<\/p>\n
Schoolwerth: By forcing the initial, spontaneously improvised painting into an incredibly slow form of processing, I\u2019d like to think that the result encodes a tension between speeds: an apparently fast and loose gestural study is compressed into the slow grind of a delicately orchestrated digital composition. This amounts to filtering conventional gesture through a contemporary lens. I like that our brains want to read the final form as fast, yet we\u2019re forced to slow down and see its complexity.<\/p>\n
Warnock: The results are certainly confounding, especially insofar as the brushstrokes appear to occupy different planes in a shallow, three-dimensional relief\u2014an illusion enhanced by various shadows. This spatial play has become a hallmark of your work in the past decade.<\/p>\n
Schoolwerth: I think there\u2019s something uniquely contemporary about this form of shallow space that everyone who plays video games or watches animated films is familiar with to the point where we don\u2019t even notice it anymore. And it\u2019s not a space you can replicate through the direct application of material to a support by hand. It requires new techniques that allow for the seamless merging of a gestural mark with its own image, to pose the key question today: \u201cIs this real?\u201d<\/p>\n
I like the somewhat unpredictable aspect of using new tools and giving up a bit of control just to see where I can take this. But it\u2019s not about the technology as such. I just want to look at something I\u2019ve never seen before.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m also thinking about the feeling of loss, and information being lost through the reception of art nowadays. When you see an artwork on a screen versus in person, you\u2019re missing ninety percent of the sensory or neural effects of that thing by scrolling past it. I\u2019m trying to build that sense of loss into the painting itself. If the final painting is already once removed from an original, then the status of the original is contingent. What happens to this thing when it\u2019s been used up to make this other thing? That bears a direct relationship to what is lost when you don\u2019t go to the gallery, you just see the show online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Molly Warnock: We first met in 2016, in the run-up to your Model as Painting exhibition in Berlin.1…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-252620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}