Hans Schmitt-Matzen: Artist Statement

My artworks are playful experiments with context. I develop and sometimes obscure causal narratives by alternately painting and photographing previously executed pieces.

The mediums of painting and photography have shared a set of representational concerns since the inception of photography in the nineteenth century, and for me it has never been possible to interpret one independently from the other. In part, my artworks are efforts to understand why pictures mean different things when they are paintings versus when they are photographs. I find it interesting that if one were to encounter two objects hanging on a wall that were visually indiscernible from one another, they would have different meanings if one were composed of paint applied by human hands and the other object were composed of emulsion applied by a machine. There are different conventions for viewing these mediums, such as how we perceive their meanings in relation to time, that are often unconsciously adopted by the viewer. My artworks are a lively reconciliation of what results when the specific meanings entrenched in each medium coalesce into a single entity. Each artwork that I make attempts to unite the mediums in a slightly different way. I frequently find the inspiration for the abstract strategies I employ in the shapes or subjects of my source photos. The artworks investigate what is possible in the language of abstraction when it is tempered by representational techniques.

I begin a new artwork by selecting a photograph that I want to work from. I have been creating an ongoing series of images called Loop in collaboration with photographer Gieves Anderson. The photographs that Gieves contributes to the Loop series are also often the starting points for the art pieces that I make independently, called Tangents. I often produce more than one Tangent based on a particular source photograph in order to examine multiple ways these works can materialize. In some instances the photograph is shown unaltered in the artwork’s final form, but at other times the photograph is radically changed in the ultimate composition or omitted completely. In addition, I often make smaller companion works that are meant to be viewed as visual notes on the processes of making the final pieces.

While my artworks have a definite focus on process as a mode of engendering meaning, it is also very important to me that the objects that I make are beautiful. I am not interested in making work that is purely conceptual or purely aesthetic but that which is able to balance elements of both. I always consider the appearance of a piece before I begin it. Yet there are paths toward new definitions of beauty in every work, and I make compromises with the objects over what they permit versus how I had imagined them. Somewhere in the midst of that struggle, meaning is created—not a meaning that can be defined with strict axioms but one that is intuited as a complex presence. These objects are my attempts to harness that presenc