Meet the Artist // Carlos Pesudo

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what you’re working on during your residency at GlogauAIR?

I was always interested in art, maybe because my grandfather was a painter. When I was seven years old, he taught me how to work with oil paint. So I started painting really young. The studio where I used to work in my hometown is where he used to paint. It’s kind of a magical place, where everything started for me.

Right now, I’m nearing the end of changing my artistic process. Something interesting happened recently, while preparing my last solo show, and now I want to explore it. My first idea was about going for something more purely abstract. But in the end I feel I’m being more precise with forms and volumes, to be more precise on the ambiguity. That’s a paradox, actually; being more precise with ambiguity. For example, I was thinking about swans. I have this thing with the swans. The swans are somehow connected with my first solo show in Madrid that was all about a rubber duck I found randomly in Berlin a long time ago, floating above the canal.  Last year when I was visiting Berlin, I spent one afternoon in the canal drawing the swans. And then I thought, that only when you are watching and drawing them, you realize how weird they are with the movements. How they look, how they change. Sometimes you don’t even know what you are looking at,  but you just know it’s a swan. I’m interested in this point, about perception. But I will never represent a swan.

In your most recent works, your colors are uniform and distinct. What is your process in choosing color?

My recent paintings from my last show were these kinds of color studies from the sea. Also in my video work, there is this abstract color sequence. I went inside with my camera and took in the colors.

Normally I don’t question the color. Why did I choose that color? Because the colors are, they choose me. Colors contain so much emotional weight. At this point, it’s not something rational in my head, I just go. Sometimes if I establish some rules for using those colors, in the end, I will probably change it.

You use the words violent, illogical and strange alongside your relationship to the natural world. Are you referring to the nature of humans or non-humans when you talk about the natural world?

For those adjectives, it’s always in terms of image; this violence of the image, the illogical, is probably the opposite of humans. But it can also have these relations to humans. For example, in dance, there’s this weird movement a body has. When things look abnormal, maybe when it’s an image of something we don’t know, it becomes weird and then it’s a distortion of something.

It’s also about this kind of inspiration I have from nature. When I was using this high magnifying lens-for example, I just looked at some insects, and found images which were really crazy. But they are mostly crazy because they don’t actually belong to our world. They don’t belong to our dimension, the human dimension. I mean, we coexist with all these images. They are surrounding us all the time. But they’re still not taking part in our usual imagery of the world.

Watching these kinds of images from nature is sometimes really violent for me. And I guess they connect with my abstract inner world. So when I work with abstraction, all these things that I see, show up in my paintings. They’re wandering in my subconscious and appear.

Interview Shay Rutkowski (@sruutrut)

Photos Yasemin Erguvan (@yaseminerguvan)