After making landscape photographs for the last ten years, I’ve come to the realization you cannot gain without giving something up. The photographs were an excuse to leave the studio, to travel and capture landscapes with the camera. And always, the history of painting poking the back of my mind. Over time the history of landscape photography became so close it became transparent, I could see through it like a windshield.

 

That stone of painting in my shoe I’d been ignoring for all these years finally broke through the skin. It made perfect sense to me to go back, before a single photo was made, to give up the camera, to gain something new. I’ve been working in a backwards loop arriving to the point of origin with painting.

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One can never really fit the meaning of everything together, it is an illusion. We are vehicles always moving, our surroundings changing in an internal voyage looking for meaning; trying to locate yourself. Where am I?

 

The vehicles symbolize change, our perspective is always in flux, as we try to frame our experiences.

 

The paintings are an invitation into an inside space where movement and change can halt for a moment. An attempt to freeze that existential anxiety of change, a place for the viewer to find a specter of one self. Where are you?

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These internal spaces provide a grounding that frees the viewers to meet challenges of explorations and change. The viewer tries on a new internal environment like fanciful costumes freeing the self to experience the world in new ways. Doing away with the prescribed ways of being.

 

We see wordless stories across these vehicles windshields.

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Behind the wheel of these vehicles is a place of journey, traveling to some self-aware state of being. The painting’s interiors are creations of what is protected and absolute in our internal lives. Outside the windshield lies the unknown world of contradictions, conflict, and dreams. The illusion outside is what we want or aspire to be.

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Luis Gispert 2021