Marcelino Stuhmer, Artist Statement

“The metaphoric crossing between perception and hallucination occurs by means of the paraphernalia of painting, which is also that of recollection and re-cognition, as the recovery, to the senses, of what seemed to be forever beyond experience.” Paul de Man

“Mise-en-abyme”, a term coined by Andre Gide, which refers to the artistic trope of limitless reflection is akin to the physical experience of the carnival’s Mirror Maze. In my current extended painting practice, which includes painting, sculpture, collage, video, performance, and site-specific installation, I wish the viewer to “enter into the work” and find themselves occupying a different parallel space, narrative, and time, where the viewer becomes both the interpreter and the subject within the image, creating an unfamiliar, uncanny sensation between experience and representation. The spatial/architectural constructions in three recent installation projects deconstruct the cinema house into 1) a panoramic painting rotunda, 2) a funhouse mirror maze, and 3) a miniature architectural model of an apartment building in Warsaw. In the broadest sense, the crisis of representation as seen in the history of painting provides me with a dynamic conceptual meeting point between material, process, and language. Representation in this sense is capable of capturing historic perceptual changes from the development of linear perspective to the birth of cubism and the modernist fragmentation of the real, and from the invention of photography and the mechanically produced copy, to the digital, virtual space of the post-cinematic (digital video & new media). My recent installation work reconstructs or invents narratives of distant geographic, and temporal moments, allowing a collision of virtual ‘present-moments’ in a space designed specifically to stage these orchestrated time-collisions. I am currently working on a series of paintings, collages, and architectural models, which explores an intersection of image, film, painting, screen, and the history of theater design.  

The Choreographed Accident: Objects, Images, & Artifacts from the Pawel Avorsky Museum, Warsaw, 2009-10 is a work of fiction, but whenever it is shown, viewers are left to experience the narrative project to decide for themselves if the work is true or not. There is no evidence on view that the work is not true. For the project I created a fictional character, Paul Avery (alias Pawel Avorsky), as well as a fictional curator, Elena Gierczek at a fiction museum dedicated to that character. The work questions the way narratives get told through a barrage of odd contradictory sources, and exercise and undermine the notion that the more detail we're gives creates a false sense of realism. Ironically, the more I researched the material to write the fictional stories, I found out that my initial suspicions about the "smuggled" origins of Polish Jazz were true. The forged newspaper clippings, the fabricated and found images, and the found super 8mm film I created are impossible to experience all at once. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an architectural model of Paul Avery’s Apartment building in Warsaw, which performs as a replica of one that Avery built. It also performs as a cinema house as Avery’s Found Film is shown on a digital frame inside the model, and is the literal location of the story. The model deconstructs the one-size-fits-all design of contemporary cinema, to create a narrative-specific space where the film screen, and narrative dictate the design, and scale of the architectural form. Inspired by the spectacle/spectator relationship in Dan Graham's Cinema, the conceptual structure of Avery's cinema is too small to enter, instead a complete sense of the narrative as a film can only play within the imagination of the viewer. This requires going back and forth between the objects, the film, the images, and the newspaper clippings. The piece is on view now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, for the Wisconsin Triennial 2010, where the model is shown with seven framed prints and one framed artifact, Avery's own used copy of the LP Free Jazz, by Ornette Coleman. I particularly enjoy the die-cut frame on the album cover, revealing the Jackson Pollack painting beneath. Painting today is a concept, an idea, and the suspension of disbelief that was at the heart of painting for centuries is alive and well, in sculpture, film, installation, and architecture. The choreographed accident of painting no longer needs to be expressed through the material of paint to express within its expanded field of discourse. The piece premiered at Jeune Creation 2009 in Paris, France in November 2009.

Get Ready to Shoot Yourself: A Painting, Mirror, and Video Installation, 2009: This installation references the ambiguity of space and time as it is depicted in the final dramatic shootout in a hall of mirrors in Orson Welles’s 1947 film, The Lady From Shanghai. The complex structure consists of a network of paintings, mirrored surfaces, video, and empty frames that make direct architectural reference to a traditional mirror maze and pulls the viewer into a dislocating, perceptive experience. Unlike in the cinema house, where the images move and the viewer remains still, here the viewer moves through a post-production space, and enters an illusory representation of cinematic space and time. The project brings the viewer directly into an illusory crisis, which is the historical crisis of painting, as discussed by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema II, where "the real and virtual are indistinguishable" and can only be deciphered through the de(con)struction of every visible image. The project premiered at the Jade Art Gallery in January 2009 in Bergamo, Italy, and was organized by Sara Mazzocchi, Cinema Curator from the GAMeC museum in Bergamo. It has also been shown in Out of the Suitcase, at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and at the Venice Arsenalle for the Arte Laguna International Prize, where I received the special mention Best International Artist in the Sculpture/Installation Category. In connection with this project, I did a performance at the Bergamo Film Meeting in Italy

The Recurring Dream: A Panoramic Painting Installation, 2007-8 depicts the famous dream sequence from the Cold War film classic, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In this scene, the camera pans 360º around the room, transforming an elderly women’s meeting on hydrangeas into a brutal Communist display of mind-control, with a theater full of communist brass waiting to see a hypnotized American sergeant kill two of his own men. The ambiguity of this scene mixes perception and hallucination, which was at the center of the language of panoramic painting. The 9-sided structure that houses The Recurring Dream creates an industrial, masculine, perhaps threatening presence, but the first thing you see as a viewer, upon entering the space, is a group of harmless older women looking in your direction, implicating you into the space. As is revealed in the film, these women are in fact an illusion; they don’t exist. These women are actually figments of the soldiers’ imagination. Thus the painting is not attempting to create a visual illusion that fools the eye, but rather it depicts what is in the film’s own narrative, an illusion. While the technical range of painting and construction processes employed, and the editing/overlapping of images create reference to the enormous perceptual changes that took place between the pre-cinematic era through to the digital video, and virtual space of the post-cinematic. As Laura Mulvey has written in Death at 24 Frames a Second, there is a growing fetishizing of the cinematic fragment as worthy artifacts that have forever changed the way film will be experienced. Everyone with a remote control is a film editor. Recreating these particular frames in oil paint, creates an additional step removed from the film, further fetishizing the post-production process, and allowing the paint to perform the task of remodeling the narrative in a new form, and with details to experience.