Kenneth Winterschladen

‘The film-maker, From a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image.’

-Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

In my practice, painting allows for a comparable form of ‘sculpting’, one that extends beyond time, encompassing sensory and emotional memory, the biographical and the mythological, and painting’s influence on perception. The paintings hold a quiet profundity, found through recollection and intense scrutiny; scrambling and reconfiguring the contents of the past to create a new iteration of something that has previously existed. My work questions society’s tendency to reduce hugely complex instants of wonderment and excitement (‘life’) to supposedly easily understood and clearly articulable examples or answers (‘lessons’), often intergrating the diagrammatical language of textbooks and instruction. Through referencing these visual signifiers, the work seeks to interrogate the belief systems and modes of thinking we often take for granted. Each painting works as a host to a diverse variety of materials and application, mirroring the fragmental topography of the psychogeographical spaces they reference. The paintings resist formulae in their function, and range from the depiction of mental spaces, to the mapping of thought processes and patterns, to the portrayal of The Idea itself. The work equally considers the complex relationship between our inner and outer worlds, as it does the structure and function of painting itself. Paint, wood, rope, and found objects become tools of analysis and a means of constructing questions. Can a painting function as a time machine, a window, a novel, a sentence, a film, all at once?