A few days ago I stumbled across the abstracted paintings of Andy Denzler and was thrown back to the past, a childhood memory of 1982 …I'll get back to that in a moment . Denzler was born and still lives in Zurich, Switzerland, he has exhibited across Europe, both on the East and West Coast of the USA, and Russia. since 2002, Denzler's work resonates with me on a deep level, I decided to grab quick email exchange with the artist as I tried to fathom exactly how he could replicate video interference in oils – the sort you come across on a ropey old VHS recorder when you hit the pause button, and he told me this:
"It's a distortion of dragging the paint with spatula to achieve "motion paintings". I'm doing this already for many many years, coming from abstract painting and changing into figurative work."
I also asked him to reveal a little more behind the thinking in his series of rather haunting oil paintings and he passed me on this very useful analysis:
"The paintings of Andy Denzler read like a 1960s television interference; the picture would momentarily grow shaky and flicker from side to side just the moment before the test pattern took over your visual world. Whilst the photographic/cinematic origins of many of Denzler's paintings are explicit, he renders them in a distinctly gestural style, lending them the appearance of a long photographic exposure or fast movie camera pan. His subjects are reduced to a blurred set of generic features, positions and clothing, thus echoing the reductive tendency present in much mainstream film and advertising, one that seeks to erase any imperfection or difference that the viewer may find unappealing. Likewise, the 'landscapes' that his subjects inhabit are most often reduced to a series of horizontal and vertical planes of muted colour. His work questions the surety of perception, both through its combination of appropriation and painterly technique as well as its playing with notions of memory and observation."
For those left with baited breath, it was 2 November 1982, the first night of Channel 4, literally the 4th ever television channel for Britain and having begged for a tiny portable black and white TV for my last combined birthday and Christmas present I sat up late, into the wee small hours and lapped up every second of what was for me a whole new vista of (a slightly more) rebellious televisual experience. At the end of the night, just before the transmission shut down the continuity announcer introduced a piece of video art, I can neither remember nor track down any information on the artist, but it was intrinsically fa life changing experience. The CH4 logo faded out to harmonic brass tones, the screen turned black ever so briefly before it filled with static. I shook my head thinking I must have slept through the experience when, just as I reached over to switch off the box I began to see faces in the pixelated fog of black, white, and grey. My eyes darted, scanning inch by inch the tiny screen, and realised the artist had "embedded" images of starving Ethiopians in the sea of crackling static, it was both horrifying and entrancing for a young kid. From then on I would always have a tendency to look deeper into the so-called dead space of our lives, visions of the dark, the beauty of interference, the architecture of perceptual illusion and chaos.
To view more of Andy Denzler's incredible abstractions or contact him for availability of works for exhibitions visit his site at www.andydenzler.com.
