How often does the world bend around itself? Points of focus shift and change, the familiar made foreign, a realm unlike any other reveals itself and brings with it a feeling of profound intimacy. This scenario is a regular occurrence in the work of Andre Hemer.
The Imagist & The Materialist continues Hemer’s study of the performance of images transitioning from digital to tangible. The works are in themselves a documentation of this action and carry the viewer along the stages in the transformation. The result is a middle ground – a visual purgatory of sorts – where space, light and colour are reimagined, and both the beginning and end result are there for all to see, yet it is this halfway point that intrigues the most.
When discussing Hemer’s work the creative process is continually touched upon. The open-air scanning of various materials, drying and solidifying paint, bringing these newfound sculptural forms into the procedure and after relentless repetition building into a multi-layered union of deep image and physicality. It is through this manual operation that one can see that the process and conceptual nature of the work are one and the same.
The artist is constantly asking and answering his own question. “How does one materialise an image?” with the act of deconstruction and reconstruction the answer. Images are initially tangible and readily handled, de-materialised and digitised, then made physical and painted into themselves. The paintings in The Imagist & The Materialist convey this activity and take the viewer from image to object while the digital video works act as a reversal and operate backwards, being intended initially as sculptural pieces, they run from object to image.
Such intense scrutiny of image and it’s response to stress and change is symptomatic of painting and always has been, and while a critical view is generally reserved for a finished state Hemer brings into question the process as a whole and questions the value of image from genesis to resolution.
