Peter de Swart
Recent Work by Peter de Swart
I have long been fascinated by the ways we choose to see the world and, equally important, by the ways the world impresses itself upon us. For not only do we look out on the world; the world gazes at us and catches us in our strangeness, our posturings, our needs, our illusions. In our age of casual narcissism, this complex reciprocity is typically overlooked. And yet is seems to me that only when the world articulates itself inside us can we begin to see: a seeing that is attentive and alive to details (and the devil inside them), a seeing that labors and plays, exposes and hides in plain view.
The work needs to speak back to me—or rather, confront me with its own silence, its inaccessibility, its remoteness from me, which is at the same time a kind of closeness. Abstractus means “drawn away”: not drawing the work toward you, but away from you, away from your concerns as an individual, so that it may gain a life of its own. In that sense, it is not a representation or reflection of consciousness; it wants to go further, to distance itself from you. You want the impossible: for the work to be visible and invisible, present and absent at the same time.
– Peter de Swart