Brad Cooper Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

YVONNE PETKUS

The source of my work is the body and the history that it holds. I study my mirrored reflection to find borders and edges, openings and weaknesses. Through a process of looking, recording, looking and adjusting, again and again, a particular presence emerges from the page. This is The Act of Looking, an intense confrontation of perception motivated by the realization that the self is fleeting; not a stable truth. The reflection is more illusion and distortion than solid and knowable form.

I work from this place of questioning, a desire to understand an unknowable something. Each piece finds origin in the coexistent and contradictory worlds of self-doubt and extreme conviction. I question the act of seeing which alternates between the sight that occurs before or in spite of looking and the actualized ocular sensing of inner complexities through external appearances. It is a type of reading, a constant doubting and distrusting of what is seen or how it is physically, psychologically being perceived. I work from a distrust of perception while relying solely on this same perception to find each final presence, its form and space.

As thought itself or, more specifically, the act of thinking, each piece is the tangible result or residue of a mental and physical processing. The end product becomes more than pictorial, though steeped completely in its visual language.

The surfaces evolve through this language, through a type of sculpting, of physically pushing the materials around to gain hold or purchase of some fleeting truth. The marks, the residues, result over time, revealing a text of breaths, struggled over, which combine to hopefully find insight into some momentary reality of the human condition. Each piece becomes about the vocabulary, the words and grammar, of painting; about pressed limitations. Each has a dialogue with and speaks from the borders of the frame.

I am trying to create works that are about one moment and a lifetime simultaneously. Through the scrutiny of the mirrored image and the actuality of the painting-in-itself as a recorded presence, I see my work as asserting itself through an evolving subject containing both strength and vulnerability and the gradations between. I aspire to transform personal, philosophical, and political convictions into visually compelling works that speak on a human level.

-Yvonne Petkus 2003

"...the body, which is part of us and at the same time withdraws from us, which makes us a form in the world of forms and then leaves us directly with our inner formlessness, which says 'I' and immediately begs for the glance of the other."

From 'The Unfulfillment and the Surfeit' By Anna Tilroe