This exhibition is a selection of recent oil paintings that were created in my studio in Konstanz. It is another edition of an exhibition (but different works) I did in New Zealand but
that I was unable to attend. “Tectonics” refers to the shifting geologies and anatomies we all experience, it is a metaphor for the passage of time – both human and geological. My painting is a combination of suggestive elements from mineral, human and vegetal realms – an intermediate place somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Forms appear only to
disappear shortly after. A suggestion of a body, a limb, a rock, a landscape or a mouth, for example, remains a suggestion – nothing more, nothing less. In my painting, I leave interpretative gaps for the viewer to fill and distance myself from any
specific meaning. I prefer to float in a universe of becoming and transition that is not situated in any particular time, or place – to imagine a world without humans, perhaps before or maybe after, human life – a world outside the politics of representation. This
“unsituatedness” comes from a place of privilege, yet allows a certain freedom or ambivalence of signification – best reflected in the anamorphic ambiguity of semi-abstract painting.
I like the process of allowing the spectator to project themselves and their imagination, onto my works, to help create the significance of the work and, over time, to build resonance with
it. For most of my life, I have been integrating into new and different cultural niches, learning new norms and languages only to then attempt to unlearn them. This experience ofimpermanence and of becoming (something or someone else) I attempt to reflect in my work. Like a rock on a cliff face, human life is subject to cataclysmic forces, to morphological resemblance and interpretative exaggeration.
Tectonics. Recent paintings by Sam Melser
