About my work Most of the time, I use ëfoundí photographs from private homepages as working basis. I am interested in questions dealing with human representation and identity, particularly in shortcuts and in the confusion often occurring when ënormalí people decide to imitate and to subvert images delivered by media. In the working process many questions arise to me: How dependent are we to our cultural or sexual models? How can we subvert the images that media imposes to us? When does ënormalityí turn into grotesque, and vice-versa? Who is imitating whom? How confused are the limits between reality and fiction? Can my works create a space beyond morality and ideological advertising? Can my work transmit ethics and a personal, multiple view on the human, that other people can share? My esthetic research concentrates on photography, painting, drawing, computer-based pictures and animation videos (morphing). I like ëpainting by numbersí, drawing-techniques I learned in preliminary school. Iím not afraid of using the most obvious filters and the most basic painting-tools photoshop supplies. I am interested in playing with the perception of the spectator by integrating my work into a more complex visual situation (installations). I want to develop a visual dialectic. I am interested in producing a ìlook-a-likeî art, that anybody could (re-) produce, just as anybody could become an Elvis Presley imitator (you just have to buy the right wig). I am interested in the critical potential of parody. I am not interested in irony. I am interested in everything ìall too humanî, which involves comedy as well as tragedy. I am also interested in the Çopennessë of pictures, in their dependence to a context and in their capacity to gain new meaning through a new context, which makes them easy to manipulate and difficult to control.

Kristofer Paetau, 2002 - 2003


More about Kristofer Paetau: www.paetau.com