Jonathan Seliger Studio

  In my work I blur the boundary between painting and sculpture to create what can be regarded as a three-dimensional polychrome hybrid. Drawing on the languages of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and the history of trompe l’oeil, I make painted canvas and painted metal renderings of quotidian recognizable objects such as milk and juice containers, shopping bags, pillows, woven baskets, Chinese Takeout containers, matchbooks and multifarious forms of commercial packaging. By focusing on familiar, mundane, or ephemeral subjects, my work aspires to be ordinary and poetic, accessible and transfigured, approachable, elevated and beautiful. I allow myself to take liberties with scale, color, surface, texture and design in order to temper the subject’s inherent graphic speed and legibility and to enable it to function metaphorically. Starting off as a flat sheet of bronze, stainless steel, aluminum or canvas, it is cut, folded, constructed and painted, reaching completion in 3 dimensional manifestation. Although considered within a long lineage of trompe l’oeil painting, my work actively departs from the Renaissance model in Western art encapsulated in the phrase, “Ut pictura poesis,” or “make it like a window.” Rather than depict these bits of ephemera, advertising, signs of commerce and urban detritus in an interior or imaginary realm (the 2-dimensional, rectilinear world of traditional picture space), I build and present these residual castoffs of popular culture, signs of an ever-expanding metropolis, in the shared domain of the spectator. I am drawn to an idea of a contemplative constructed object that exists in real space.

  My educational background is in literature, with a concentration in lyric poetry, so it is natural that my work is rooted in a celebration of the demotic and the commonplace. In his late poem, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” the American poet Wallace Stevens posited what became my aesthetic statement of purpose: in the poem he praises the doubleness of experience and the sensuality of perception, what he named “the illumined large in the veritable small.” Contemporaneously, the American poet, William Carlos Williams, exhorted “No ideas but in things,” a simple declaration that continues to have a resonant bearing on my thought process. Stated another way, I have sought to extend, update, reinterpret and enliven Jasper Johns’ famous dictum: “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.” With humor, pathos and poignancy I hope that my work can engage the viewer and, in the words of scholar Norman Bryson, have her or him “look at the overlooked,” in order to re-examine the already-seen.