Come see our current exhibition at Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts | Tonal Apparition by Cristian Andersson
This exhibit will be open November 3rd through January 5th! Free Admission!
Artist Statement: I have never gone down a single path with my artistic practice–there are times that I am doing oil paintings that are visual transcriptions of contemporary classical music and others that I am doing performance art about the breakdowns of communication through social media. I’ve had as much pleasure distorting sound and looping it through the computers speakers as I have putting paint to canvas. There are works that take me an afternoon to complete and others that I spend six months on. Having an exhibition like this, split between two floors, has let me consider a different nuance to my work. Paintings that are filled with joy and color with others that are solemn, and at times, heavy.
The first floor gallery are works primarily coming from my Symphonic Series. The images are created as I listen to a piece by a composer like the recently passed Kaija Saariaho, recreating what I hear into a visual soundscape–placing instrumentation, notes, and feeling into form, line, and color. While the music can be difficult at times, these paintings are always additive. Always growing. Free and full of life. Stepping up into the second floor gallery the mood changes. The White Series are paintings that are of what once was. Fully realized paintings (at times a Symphonic Series painting themselves) before being negated with layers of white until little hints of what once was still remains. The fog of time and memory have taken over until only the brightest highlights of the past still survive. There even is a painting on this floor that has been physically created with the hopes that it will actually fall apart over time, as I have intentionally broken some cardinal oil painting rules in its structure.
My hope is that seeing these two groupings of work translates to the viewer the battles I constantly am fronted with as my heart flourishes and breaks for the world around me. Maybe you feel it also? And perhaps, maybe on the stairs going between the floors or after leaving this building entirely, these paintings have touched you in a way that you can realize that the world is filled with as much good as there is strife. Find peace. This exhibition is as much about love and anguish as it is about the hope that amity can be found between, and within, the soul through the help of others.
