„Medium Size Paintings (Born to Be Old)“

„Medium Size Paintings (Born to Be Old)“

We can’t quite remember how the title „Born to Be Old” came about. We only remember that it had to do with the fascination with the interior of a tanning salon in Cologne’s Nordstadt district. „California Sun“ (the only sun to shine through Cologne’s winter days) – right next to the railway tracks, a motorcycle shop, and a boxing club –, with its yellow, red, and blue mosaics, endless reflections and fluorescent lights.

But the phrase also points to certain bodily and emotional conditions. As if slapstick comedy could be transferred to a state of being or a body sensation. It should be sung as a mantra, not like a biker movie soundtrack or a cheesy disco hit. An engraved emotional tattoo of constantly being, and acting too late for the current moment, for freshness, the up-to-date, the here and now.

Our paintings move between cartoons, remakes, movie posters, and Goya’s „Disparates“, whose old women/witches make one think about a different kind of female body representation. Their skin sagging, their bodies crouching, their hands and feet contracted, they are funny-looking, they are doing their thing and they are really into it.

Everyday observations appear as film scenes that interweave like patterns and vignettes in knotted carpets; colours mislead, intensify, or fade away. It is about looking closely, about interiors, about paraphrases, about codes that sometimes reveal themselves and sometimes disappear. The compositions tend to work against themselves – anti-composition, perhaps. Motifs tilt, overlap, and reappear elsewhere. Stages and scenes in flux. They emerge pulsating and rhythmic. Resonating, vibrating, clinking and humming. Our canvases are transforming and spitting out hordes of characters.

Lonely boys, nightmares and follies, talking Crayolas, space shifters, ladders, spirals and souvenirs. In this body of work, the figures are medium, but they are into it, and they have lots of potential – they are always in the process of becoming something else. They hardly seem to fit within the frame of the canvas (Sarah and Tiffany) or appear ridiculously centred (Ani). They are asking who is on stage and what moment in time is being narrated.

It is also about looking intensely: at master paintings, sketches, daily iPhone pictures. At all the „good and bad” painterly decisions people make, knowingly or unknowingly. Drawing something over and over again is a way of looking and thinking.

Spirits or ghosts possess the process – the process changes just as the artist’s routines, diet, musical tastes, mood and overall personality change. At one point, a dark spirit
even took out all color of Tiffany’s paintings.

It might be worth documenting how the work changes each time a different spirit takes hold.

The term „Medium Size Paintings” came up last autumn during Tiffany’s exhibition „Venus Mirror“ in Pomona. A series of medium-sized canvases hung in a Californian garage. Neither large nor small: Medium size. A format that creates problems because it comes with hardly any of the attributes that initially flatter painting. One immediately thinks of mediocrity. Medium is an awkward and average size. No one likes to be medium or average. Whenever one is in the middle of finishing a body of work, an emotional episode emerges, fearing being a “mediocre” painter. Not good, nor bad; not black, nor white; not big, nor small; not young nor close to death old. Scaled to the human body. Unassuming. You are neither overwhelmed by size nor required to move closer. A wall object made of stretched fabric on a frame, adjusted to human dimensions.

We remember Tiffany saying, “I hate this format.” A format that appears as neither fish nor fowl, neither use nor ornament, nichts Halbes und nichts Ganzes.

And yet, here we are. We agreed to give it a try together.

Nothing more tedious than artists – especially male painters – working in series. The same format, over and over again. Can’t go wrong. Here, instead, it is three different painters testing themselves against the same condition.

Is this an “anti-series”-series by medium-aged female artists? Maybe we should hang them edge to edge, as a continuous stretch.

We are excited to see what happens.

Old sized paintings – born to be medium.
(Ani, Tiffany, Sarah)

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»Kaiwa No 2/3«

Sarah Szczesny & Ani Schulze & Pui Tiffany Chow
„Medium Size Paintings (Born to Be Old)“

Kapute Szene, Cologne
Opening: July 2h , 6pm
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Kapute Szene
public space for art, music, film, literature, debate and discussion
Kyffhäuserstr. 31, 50674 Köln (Backyard)
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Friendly supported by Kaput- Magazin für Insolvent & Pop / Kunststiftung NRW