Mindscapes

This is my travel diary. A journey that started long before 2003 (when I started these records) and that lasts until today. My “travel souvenirs” are reflecting a state of mind at a specific moment, when doings and findings intertwined, a new idea arose, that then materialized.

For this publication I took photos (or mounted stop-motion videos) of my work.

Also photos appear as souvenirs themselves.

In both cases taking these pictures meant re-visiting a mindscape of the past, a second travel took place. My paintings or sculptures that are depicted in photos or videos gained therefore a second sense or meaning. A view that, for instance, earlier was draped in a certain exuberant monumentality, or that was somehow distorted by the exhilaration of its discovery, can later become ironical and comical, or even awkward and unpleasant… Sometimes an earlier concept needed this kind of reconsideration. Otherwise it seemed to me not worth been shown here as a mindscape.

It is about painting, photographing, collages & sculpturing in virtual and real space, about merging these approaches, gliding from one into another. At some time I realized that even an uncomfortable thing like computer coding can be experienced as a form of beauty, paired with a little satisfaction… it is like tracing an or retracing a conceptual idea within the world of strictest lingual rules and codes.

(the beauty of correct lingual expressions complying to logics, that fascinated already the ancient greeks)

… or vice-versa, a rough and impulsive hand sketch can make evolve a dry technical drawing into something totally unexpected. If this breakthrough succeeded, the mainstream economical, technological, scientific & utilitarian principles have been overcomed -transcending therefore its dominance and repressivness, and starting to communicate through a different level.

Never artists were entitled to such a large set of expressions, deriving from all inter-disciplinary areas of human knowledge, and based on a large cultural diversity, therefore I refer here to the metaphor of travelling. To push this metaphor further: the traveller always brings his luggage of earlier experiences onto the new site in two ways:

First, to himself as traveller, his perception of the new is influenced by his own past.

Secondly, the traveller alters the site. When reaching a new terrain, not only there is a new input to the traveller’s mind, but there is also his output to the site. It can be minor or major. Its influence ranges from “almost invisible” to “totally destructive”. Anything between “overwhelmed” or “overwhelming”.

The achievements of modernism, then, of postmodernism, then, of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze… also allowed to go deep into the understanding of linguistic structures and codes, and gave – this is very important to me – a new value to the Virtual:

The Virtual is not transcending the real world and therefore denying it, but precisely the fracture in-between these two allows all human evolution and exploration, both, of the inherent and transcendant.

Recent technologies (e.g. video and electronics, the web, robotization…) became artistic tools. They were used in contemporary works, and even became subject to contemporary art themselves. (French philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call this: overcoding) This new diversity of techniques, tools and expressions is again an unprecedented opening to new subjectivism, to new references, it becomes a small, but precious, counter-weight to the dominant culture.

This should be an era of hope: never people could have been so conscious, detached, pluralistic, with a highly differentiated view, than nowadays… Unfortunately we can observe very often the exact opposite…

All this can immensly push forward the artistical production and expressions, and this at times where mainly human creativity serves rarely “higher goals” anymore: neither a kind of spirituality nor a transcendental, like it has been in the past: it serves economical profit and/or serves to impose power on people, in an immediate way – or in a hidden (manipulating) way. And is consequently causing the destruction of humanity (literally two meanings: Menschheit and Menschlichkeit) and causing – undenyably – the destruction of this planet.

Therefore, what distinguishes an artistical expression in its essence from pure engineering or architecture is its economic futility, and hopefully, the artist’s endeavor gains another different value that can be purely value for itself.

Thank you for visiting!

Jan Rom, 2023