Seth Pick’s paintings establish an art approach in which the human silhouette never seems to be entirely fixed. Human bodies elongate, intermingle and sometimes look like to merge with the canvas surface, whilst faces appear to have a clearer definition. In other words, Pick knowingly depicts identifiable figures on an unstable pictorial field without reaching complete abstraction. In some of his works, the background is empty; the face occupies the middle part of the composition as an isolated person, and everything else is constantly moving around. The continual transition from recognition to distortion creates a sort of special tension in his paintings. A person, gesture, or face can be identified, but that identification does not make one feel at ease with it for long. The image never stays stable.
The image of a head is featured in a number of compositions as a sort of lonely entity while the lines, painted sections and other figures are busy moving around it. In various contexts, multiple characters appear to take part in the same physical situation, making their limbs hard to discern from one another. This creates a distorted way of representing the body and also alters the body continuously. It looks like the human form can expand, contract, disappear, and emerge again from the scene.
words: yannis kostarias
Although, sometimes, the dramatic nature of his visual depictions is quite apparent, it appears that characters laugh, smile, confront each other, or act energetically, their facial impressions are not necessarily ones corresponding with the emotions. A smile may seem oddly disconcerting; laughter may sound almost ironic, nervous or devoid of joy. A specific type of dark humour emerges in this way, which combines comic with frightening.
Pick’s handling of colours enhances perplexity and mystification in his compositions. The artist’s colour palette shifts dramatically from great reds and dark reds to electric blues, and acidic greens, and bright grays, and finally sometimes represents just one colour. In certain paintings the hues seem to be responsible for the overall psychological arrangement of the visible scene: a bright red canvas gives the possibility for the characters to seem exposed while an intense blue canvas makes them look isolated. Different contrasts have been used in the paintings purposely and give to every single painting distinctive emotional temperature.
At the same time, however, Pick manages to exercise rather a firm command over the painted surface. The instability of the visual images seems to be counterbalanced by the contours of the painted shapes that have been carefully constructed and thereby layered. In the works from different eras, one can note the constant interest in faces as concentrated forms of identity. They are frequently the most distinct objects amidst all the unreliability. On some occasions, the visage appears upright and even confrontational, whereas at other times the face is partially hidden, reassured, or moved. The result of this visual language leads to the uniqueness of the depicted being, since it is at once identifiable as a person and part of an extensive image that cannot easily be understood.
Thus, the resulting mood seems to be gloomy instead of bright, although still energetic. The works of Pick vibrate due to the movement, color, and slight refusal to be completely clear. Their mystery does not rely on a concealed tale that should be solved by the viewer. The paintings take their mystery from the collision of the things that we understand and those that we struggle to understand. Thus, the paintings stay in that state of tension, where humor becomes disturbing, beauty turns into grotesqueness, and the human body remains unmistakable despite its constant physical metamorphosis during the process of painting.
How would you define your work in a few words (ideally in 3 words)?
Figural, unstable, associative.
Could you share with us some insights on your new work named ‘Alles hat ein ende nur die Wurst hat zwei’ (2026)? Is there any particular story behind this new painting?
The title comes from a German song and translates roughly as “Everything has an end, only the sausage has two.” I was drawn to the stupidity and humour of the phrase, but also to the fact that underneath the joke is this very simple statement about endings and mortality. i was interested in a scene about connection and the loss of it, loneliness perhaps.
The faces of people prove to be some of the clearest signals when it comes to recognition even amidst the rest of the composition which appears haphazard. What keeps faces so significant in your art and what makes you decide that a face should either take up the main part of the image or be placed at the back?
Faces are almost impossible not to read. We recognise them incredibly quickly and immediately begin trying to interpret them. That makes them very useful to me as points of recognition, they can anchor an otherwise unstable image. I’m interested in frustrating recognition. A face might appear psychologically expressive but not actually tell you very much. Enlarging a face can make that ambiguity more confrontational, whereas placing one further back can make it function almost like a visual interruption, something that suddenly becomes recognisable within a more ambiguous field. I don’t have a fixed hierarchy for where faces should appear. Their position develops through the particular logic of each painting.
You build tension between movement and stillness in your protagonists. The bodies seem to move energetically, crumple, face off each other or overlap, but the exact motivation of the motion remains unclear. How do you succeed in achieving the effect of motion without transforming the painting into the narration?
I’m interested in movement as something pictorial rather than necessarily narrative. Deleuze’s writing on Bacon, and particularly his distinction between the figurative and the figural, has been important to me in thinking about this.A body can carry movement without its gesture having to illustrate a particular action or event. That also comes about through what I think of as indexicality. A brushstroke is not only used to describe an image; it is also a physical trace of the movement that made it. So the movement in the paintings exists both in the represented figure and in the material construction of the image itself. A painted body might bend or collapse, while the marks that construct it record another set of gestures and movements. I think this helps prevent the movement from becoming purely narrative. You can experience something happening physically without necessarily being able to say what is happening or why.
Numerous figures of your paintings show that people smile or laugh at times but this smile does not necessary come across as anything happy. Is there a certain irony, discomfort or anxiety you aim to underline at all?
I’m very interested in the point at which a smile stops functioning as an uncomplicated sign of happiness. A smile can be joyful, but it can also be nervous or forced or completely detached from the situation around it. There is something Kafkaesque about that ambiguity for me. Kafka can be extremely funny, but the humour doesn’t relieve the anxiety; somehow the two intensify one another. I’m interested in a similar instability in an image. Something can be genuinely funny without the painting becoming ironic, and disturbing without becoming tragic. So I wouldn’t say that I use smiles to symbolise anxiety or discomfort. I’m more interested in making it difficult to decide exactly what kind of expression we are looking at.
The way you use colours differs from painting to painting, both in terms of the colours you use and their intensity, ranging from bold reds and burgundies to bright blues and greens. In your opinion, does colour have more influence on emotions and mood, or is it also important to the overall composition of the painting?
Colour is both emotional and structural, but I probably think about it structurally first. I don’t have a fixed symbolic relationship to particular colours. I’m more interested in what a colour does in relation to everything around it. This is also why the palette can change quite radically from one painting to another. I want each painting to establish its own internal logic rather than colour becoming a stylistic system that automatically connects all of the works. I’m also interested in colour as something that can affect the physical experience of looking. In my exhibition FAILING, for example, I used a fluorescent green as the background of one of the paintings, and it created a very particular haptic space. Its intensity made it feel as though it pushed forward toward the viewer, while the figures appeared to sit within, against, and behind it. The spatial relationship became really physically strange.
Do you expect any specific emotions from your viewers’ experience as they explore your body of work?
No. I think expecting a specific emotional response would contradict what I want the paintings to do. Once a work is made and enters the world, I don’t think I have authority over what somebody else should experience in front of it. In that sense, Barthes’ idea remains important to me: the artist’s intention is not the final meaning of the work. What I can do is construct certain conditions = recognition, ambiguity etc, but I don’t want to determine how those things should be interpreted or felt. Ideally the paintings remain open enough that different viewers can make different connections, and that even the same viewer might understand a painting differently after spending more time with it.
8. Which are your plans for the near future?
I’m becoming increasingly interested in Fernando Pessoa’s use of heteronyms. What interests me is that they weren’t simply different names for the same author, but distinct identities with their own styles, attitudes and ways of seeing the world. I’ve started thinking about whether something similar could happen within a painting practice. Rather than trying to consolidate a recognisable style, I want to push the differences between individual paintings much further , almost as though different paintings could come from different positions or different painters. I’m interested in how far I can take that before the body of work stops holding together, and what it might mean for the coherence of a practice to come from the relationships and tensions between works rather than from stylistic consistency.
all images courtesy of the artist