Deborah Schamoni

Spichtigs large-scale paintings and room-spanning sculptures relay the image-world of his network— the art/music scenes with which he’s deeply involved — fusing it to the art historically significant forms while understanding painting as an original aggregator/screen. Made with inkjet vinyl prints and oil paint on raw canvas, Spichtig’s paintings are richly material and highly mediagenic; indeed memory of the digital resides in the works’ DNA. Each piece starts with an image—something like a mental screenshot of life’s stream—filtered through a digital mode, then transferred to canvas.
As Spichtig works the printed-painted image into the canvas, saturating it with pigment, the photo- graphic becomes embedded in layers of the “real.” In this process, data drops from view, overwritten by new information imparted by the painter’s hand. The resulting images are highly specific yet stripped to their base elements. Together, the paintings reflect the image world of Spichtig’s community of artists, musicians, and writers. In a way, these paintings resemble well-circulated memes. As repositories of contemporary codes, they are arrestingly familiar yet possess enough semiotic breathing room for the user/viewer to mediate them anew, making them their own.
Further to Spichtig’s paintings are his sculptures, which likewise take something personal and pare it down to its core sign. Sourcing previously owned domestic objects—e.g.,refrigerators, couches, mat- tresses—Spichtig presents a single category, filling the space with this one type of thing.