Andreas Jaeggi:
"Blue Nude"
Two Paintings in Oil & Acrylic on Canvas Panels, Framed
24" x 20" each
2002

Let's put the sexual stimulation of the new-Berlinese (or old-NewYorkese, post-Parisian and ex-SanFranciscan) pornography aside for the moment. I would also like to get as far away as possible from anything illustrative, decorative or anecdotal. I am trying to find out what remains, if I eliminate or at least minimize all fashion attributes such as loud hair colorations, extreme hairdos, trimmed and styled facial hair, piercings of the most erogeneous body zones and tattoos. What remains if I reduce the individual traits of the models? What remains if the representation of a naked body becomes a landscape of colored movements of feminine and male lines and surfaces? It may very well be that not much remains, very little actually: just some barely defined humanoid shapes. Or on the contrary, such a reduction may allow me to make visible the essence of the never ceasing attraction as well as repulsion in that unstable balance between the sexes.

After several thousands of years of art history, the representation of an unclothed body is still, again and remains a social and/or politico-religious issue. It is a glaring sign of the general non-changeability of the combination of signals sent from the human brain.

The translation of a three-dimensional reality, such as I perceive it, onto a surface is a constant tug-of-war between the search for simplicity and multi-layered depth. Simple and understandable symbols stand for events and elements of my past life, like the music engraved into, as well as the scratches from much use marring the surface of, a shellacked LP record. These big and small "realities" have trickled through a fine meshed sieve full of ragged holes like one's memory. I use these symbols like semi-transparent playing cards during my artistic working process and toy around with overlapping motifs. In the end though, I usually focus on one main statement as the end result of my artistic work.