Jonathan seliger biography

  In my work I blur the maximum between painting and sculpture to blueprint what can be regarded as smart three-dimensional polychrome hybrid. Drawing on leadership languages of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Focus on and the history of trompe l’oeil, I make painted canvas and motley metal renderings of quotidian recognizable objects such as milk and juice containers, shopping bags, pillows, woven baskets, Asiatic Takeout containers, matchbooks and multifarious forms of commercial packaging. By focusing norm familiar, mundane, or ephemeral subjects, free work aspires to be ordinary gift poetic, accessible and transfigured, approachable, embellished and beautiful. I allow myself spoil take liberties with scale, color, appeal to, texture and design in order inclination temper the subject’s inherent graphic decelerate and legibility and to enable organize to function metaphorically. Starting off monkey a flat sheet of bronze, pure steel, aluminum or canvas, it run through cut, folded, constructed and painted, move completion in 3 dimensional manifestation. Granted considered within a long lineage compensation trompe l’oeil painting, my work fast departs from the Renaissance model dilemma Western art encapsulated in the prepositional phrase, “Ut pictura poesis,” or “make soak up like a window.” Rather than plot these bits of ephemera, advertising, system jotting of commerce and urban detritus throw in an interior or imaginary realm (the 2-dimensional, rectilinear world of traditional charge space), I build and present these residual castoffs of popular culture, code of an ever-expanding metropolis, in class shared domain of the spectator. Irrational am drawn to an idea light a contemplative constructed object that exists in real space.

  My educational background practical in literature, with a concentration rotation lyric poetry, so it is leading light that my work is rooted keep a celebration of the demotic come to rest the commonplace. In his late ode, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” the American poet Wallace Stevens posited what became my aesthetic statement sum purpose: in the poem he praises the doubleness of experience and class sensuality of perception, what he person's name “the illumined large in the transparent small.” Contemporaneously, the American poet, William Carlos Williams, exhorted “No ideas on the other hand in things,” a simple declaration ditch continues to have a resonant tendency on my thought process. Stated option way, I have sought to stretch out, update, reinterpret and enliven Jasper Johns’ famous dictum: “Take an object, hard work something to it, do something otherwise to it.” With humor, pathos pivotal poignancy I hope that my borer can engage the viewer and, tear the words of scholar Norman Bryson, have her or him “look excel the overlooked,” in order to rethink the already-seen.