Reverse Artists (2023)

“…earlier this year I was reckoning with the fact that I have not felt like painting for a while. I felt complexly about this, and at the time I particularly felt crushed under the weight of the history of Western painting. I had been thinking about Jackson Pollock, and I felt a bit mad at him for splattering paint on the ground, almost as if if he had not done that, I would be able to paint freely. This is probably because he, along with other abstract expressionists, made us question the picture surface, “deconstructed” the illusion I had of the magic of the representational image. I could no longer suspend disbelief in my resims. I had the urge to reverse what he had done to recover the charm and I asked myself ‘What would a reverse Pollock look like?’

[How could I do this impossible task of reversing art history?]. I thought maybe I could come up with a contraption that could suck paint off of the surface into a paintbrush. And the more I [thought], the less upset and [the] more empathetic I became. For the time being, I settled on reversing an iconic footage of him painting to see what that looked like, and as my feeling evolved, I thought maybe reversing his art would also reverse the tragedy of his early death. From here came a bigger video installation where I reversed many of my favorite art history icons’ filmed workings [left to right: Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic.]”

- Ceyhun, 2023