My paintings focus on demands addressed to the body in public and private spaces. Seeing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed and through which histories take place and are understood, I paint bodily dispositions that mark embodiments of social imperatives that direct different aspects of identity and selfhood. In looking at struggles arising from this embodiment, I paint bodies for what they fail to be and for how they fail to settle in any image or concept that confine and regulate them.

I construct my work in series. Each series consists of images that confuse a specific borderline, presenting bodies that cannot or will not settle on each side of its binary oppositions, or bodies that are rendered invisible by it.

From the standpoint of modernist heritage, the history of the painting tradition marks false artistic ideals and idle hierarchies, and making figurative paintings echoes the making of false idols, with all their forbidden and seductive power. Seeing images as possessing a power that needs to be tamed is nothing but new, but in today’s unprecedented rapid exchange of images, the seductive power of images and their ability to influence people are felt as never before. Making representational paintings of the body, my work moves between idolatry and false idol making. Looking at contemporary icons of power and disassembling them, I give the marginal a central status through the iconic form of painting and respond to the worshiping of false idols of bodies.

A very important fact in my paintings is the meeting/combination of graphic, classical painting technique and drawing. I combine traditional representation forms with contemporary, subcultural elements and subjects out of a popculture, comic, streetart and tattoo art context. Heraldic ornaments and classic portrait painting meet superheroes and masked wrestlers. I´m interested in painting itself and in creating a own context and atmosphere where my protagonists are part. I like to question fixed viewing concepts and want to introduce new characters. They could be the heroic main characters in b-movies ore science fiction films, pose dramatically or infiltrate film noir scenes. With their radical manner they touch sometimes the uncanny, but always with a slight humour. I portrait them in a mixed up world between trash and exaggerate poses in contrast to a vintage, romantic atmosphere. They find themselves between the scenes but with sincere ideological belive.

I paint rubble as a portrait of the human condition. Any pile of ruins holds memories, moments in time. I am the witness of destruction, not the destroyed, not the destroyer.

My work contains a sense of documentation but also of universality, since the places in the paintings are not anchored to a specific event. I describe demolished buildings based on published photographs of Palestine. The photographs are the only way I witness them, and so they become the only reality. The paintings present the absurdity of that reality, but at the same time create a composition of color and shape that is purely formal, evoking beauty and harmony. The experience of the work is therefore a mix of pleasure and terror.

Painting is destined by physical reality as a condition of both interior and exterior. I´m interested in not only the painting´s inner structure but also this condition. Images from the specific context are transformed into the system of my painting as materiality. Currently, I´m a bottomless painter, image rider, intruder and stalker who is thinking about type, typo, topology as a structure of pun and an interconnection of each other in social, material and image system.

My recent work has evolved from research into how we perceive, use, and come into contact with the landscape surrounding us. My interests lie in how we project our own memories and myths onto woodlands or trees. Reading literature on natural history has become an integral part in my practice, one of the most influential books being Richard Mabey's "Beechcombings, The Narrative of Trees" that deals with the seemly contradictory methods of how we treat the landscape and how we view it. Landscape painting has a long tradition, my exploration began with the Romantic movement of the 19th Century, focusing on the strong projection of our own spiritual ideals onto the vistas depicted and continued on to look at the critique of those views as sentimental and self-indulgent by contemporary artists such as Peter Rostovsky. My research focuses on the idea of transendental qualities in landscape and how it can be seen as an exploitation of these vistas for our own ends. I took a long look at Barnet Newman's theories on inducing transcendental feelings within the viewer and came to the conclusion that I didn't want to use my canvas as a tool to induce to concept of the transendental. I want it to stand there for its own sake, as a painting, dealing with the materiality of the substance as well as embodiment of a personal view of the landscape. I became far more interested in the myths we have surrounding our experience of landscape and how it doesn't appear to be compatible with modern living. I am particularly influenced by the intensity of Peter Doig's "Concrete Cabin" series in which the modern notion of utopia living has failed, becoming derelict, as the vast, alien forest has begun to reclaim the ground.

Soledad Pinto’s work intends to recover the hybrid atmosphere of “lost territories”—landscapes memories, cityscapes, and urban ruins—, translating and restoring them in tension with the material boundaries of the exhibition space.

These translations (reterritorializations) are conceived as interplays between opposite poles and juxtapositions of different kind of spaces in a single place. They want to call the attention to those micro-processes where the solidness of the boundaries is contested in almost invisible ways, to highlight the ambivalent, contingent, and transient nature of the limits that structure our daily experience. Artworks that deal with ideas of landscape seek to create possible moments of co-existence of the two sides of the distinction inside/outside at the same time-space, meaning the dissolution of the boundary itself. On the other hand, projects on urban ruins ?abandoned buildings or in state of demolition? stress the fact that those spaces configure systems of opening and closing possibilities, which isolate them as much as make them penetrable. In these sites the passing of the time devours specific features and collapses the space’s constitutive antinomies, i.e. Near/Distant and Inner/Outer.

Pinto’s artworks are made up as assemblages of slices in/of time-and-materiality. Their installation follows a multilayered process: the superposition of “represented” and “real” spaces, the accumulation of materials and mediums, and the overlapping of different stratum of meaning.

Johannes Rochhausen opts for the method of most radical reduction, by constructing a fictional absence of worldly matters and turning the artist‘s studio, a special case of the classic interior, into the foca l point of his perception. […]

Human protagonists make no appearance in Rochhausen’s studio paintings, they are instead dominated by outer coordinates: floor, wall, ceiling, window, paintings, frames, easel, brush, sink and colour tubes are listed with what initially appears as great seriousness (with the matter- of-fact sympathy of a bug collector, who happens to be interested in insects). Taken together, they create an almost paranoid cosmos. While a single studio painting may still be seen as a comparably factual depiction of a work place, this impression vanishes after viewing the manifold variants and variations of Rochhausen‘s development of the subject. You can feel that behind this long-term limitation on a narrow subject matter lies a passionate earnestness. With the instinct of an archaeologist who sees the remnants of a lost culture in an aerial shot, Rochhausen unearths the opportunities offered by the universe of the studio. The equivalent to the promising stratum hiding many secrets for the archaeologist, are to Rochhausen the layers of paint which he gives a special smoothness and simultaneous brittleness with the aid of his brush. His painted studio walls appear worn like the skin of an old billboard or advertising column, which not only serves as a support again and again, but eventually turns into an image itself. […]

My work is solely about pointing to the traces and effects of human behavior.

I steer clear both of exceptions and the exceptional. Instead, I search out the opposite of so-called attractions. The ingredients are of a rather simple kind. Any truth contained in these images is based on correspondences and analogies. If the represented alone came to the fore I would have missed my mark. I am not aiming at the visible but at the invisible that it points us to. The idea is to hit the nail on the head. Without hammer or nail.