Yvonne Petkus

As a process-driven artist, I am invested in painting as a physical act of thinking and in mark making as a living action. Searching for both material and image-based resonances, I explore ideas of struggle, vulnerability and strength, and the forces of nature against the body (sometimes all found in a single gesture, like a dash or a run). Realizations are found through the additive and subtractive act of painting, through intense questioning, and in the freedom of image invention that painting allows. Each piece is about, acts as, a meditation, a grasping – a search for meaning.

Embedded into each painting is a catalogue of indexes that continues to develop over time. These include responses to cultural sources, like the Polish film Ida, recent personal and world events, and work conducted in Iceland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in Italy. Using sketches, serial painting, and a back and forth negotiation of form and space, I move through and past immediate sources toward their broader implications, preferencing visual cues and traces over realistic representation.

The strategy here is a distancing through processing, allowing both destabilization and formation through tweaks and slips, breaks and conflations. Connections are able to surface slowly and organically, as an acknowledgement of the codified language of painting, the knowing, paired with the use of that language to go beyond its known self, the not-knowing.

In a recent exploration of cases for a new sublime in contemporary painting, I have found that the term "weight" has supplanted the word "sublime" for what I propose through my work and research. It is not the Sublime of the past, the larger-large or terrible awesome, but rather a "weight", found incrementally through a million small-bigs – that add up, affect, distort, inform – as forces for a similar question of our relationship to what now terrifies, to what now awes. It is about the moment-to-moment negotiations, the pressure points that have emerged in our current times, expressed as fragments, accumulations, and glimpses.

The overarching goal is to use visceral cues and a shifting, layered surface as evidence of a larger struggle. What hopefully remains to be experienced through the paintings themselves is the residue of the search itself.

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