Image courtesy of David Wasch

Interview: David Wasch

David Wasch was born in 1987 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He graduated in 2013 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. During his graduation exhibition he got nominated for the Young Blood Award 2013 by Gallery Ron Mandos in Amsterdam, as well as for the Concordia competition for young talent by PAK Gistel in Belgium. Wasch’s work spans a wide range of media including painting, drawing, collage, text and projection/video-installations. He makes portraits, human shapes seen from behind or figures without faces, so that the viewer can effortlessly and unabashedly get to know the image itself. Wasch is slowly investigating the technical and intrinsic aspects of painting. The positioning and meaning of collage in relation to the paintings have led to a two-part investigation, in which the condition of painting is set against the photographic details of a montage. Wasch suggests a reverse working process that questions which boundaries he is unable or does not need to touch within the accepted parameters of the two visual languages.

Image courtesy of David Wasch

Luca Curci – When you start practicing art and why?
David Wasch – I used to draw almost every day from young till my 21th. My parents always told me to go to an art academy, but I wasn’t that interested in it, I just wanted to draw for myself, plus as an adolescent I didn’t want to do what my parents suggested, so I I tried several bachelors in totally different directions than art, but those all bored me quite fast. After that I was 21 and thought oh well.. let’s try this art academy. As of then all kinds of new impulses, ideas, concepts, practices were handed to me and I got addicted to a new kind of energy, which still triggers me to create and to search – to be curious.

Image courtesy of David Wasch

L. C. – Can you talk about your artistic work? Which are your inspirations?
D. W. – Every picture is subjective. The Image is being looked at from within the viewer’s reality – his or her mind’s eye. The represented image doesn’t exist without the viewer. The viewer links his or her subjective thoughts, memory and knowledge to the represented image. My exploration of media imagery led me to experiment with fragmentations, repetitions, or distortions of the photographic image, and how one image can be viewed in all these different realities by one or more people.  So the interaction and possibilities of paint and photographic images is what inspires me probably the most. Most of the time I make paintings or collages, but by playing with these media, it can still mean that through these, I come to an idea which has to be executed in a different medium like video or sculpture.

Image courtesy of David Wasch

L. C. – What are you currently working on?
D. W. – At the moment I’m working on new images for an exhibition in which I’m playing with the term Rhizome (used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). In this theory there’s no beginning or end: it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization. I’m playing with this theory in the images itself, as well as in the way of representing these images in an exhibition.

Image courtesy of David Wasch

L. C. – What was the best advice given to you as an artist?
D. W. – As soon as you can define an image, it’s dead.

L. C. – What is art for you?
D. W. – Actively looking. I suppose what I am saying does sound very general. But when one is speaking of the essence of something, it sometimes happens that you can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.

Image courtesy of David Wasch

L. C. – What do you think about International ArtExpo organization?
D. W. – There are a lot of different artists and viewers of different countries. It’s good that the boarder of the surrounding and environment of the artists and visitors is being widened. I also think the idea that the exhibition is mobile and switches from country to country is very fruitful as a resource for culture.

L. C. – Do you think International ArtExpo organization can represent an opportunity for artists?
D. W. – By being mobile and international, it automatically does. It connects unreachable lines between the dots.

more. www.davidwasch.com