Date of Award
Spring 5-2019
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
I am a mixed media artist working primarily within painting. I make layered, photo-based works that come from dreams and my own photographic archives. At the moment I am making oil paintings on board. What interests me the most is the nature of reality, including perception, memory, time, and dreams. I create environments that I like to call my own mindscapes; imagined places that have the potential to become real. I am engaged in creating worlds that are “in-between” reality and the imagined, dreams and waking life, conscious and unconscious.
My work engages and expands within the tradition of Western art history, more specifically, painting. I see my paintings connected to Greek and Roman wall frescoes, medieval panel painting, and with other more modern and contemporary art forms such as photography, film, comics, and video games.
Through the use of sketches, digital enhancement, and paintings, I create an alternate world in which the observer recomposes the story using different elements that I provide, in a way that the same scenario can be recreated in an infinite number of ways.
Language
English (en)
Program Director
Patricia Olynyk
Program Director's Department
Graduate School of Art
Thesis Advisor
Buzz Spector
Studio/Primary Advisor
Zlatko Cosic
Studio/Primary Advisor
Michael Byron
Committee Member
Nathaniel Jones
Committee Member
Nathaniel Jones
Recommended Citation
Patao, Hugo, "Time, Space, and Reality" (2019). Graduate School of Art Theses. ETD 123. https://doi.org/10.7936/9c6k-x606.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/samfox_art_etds/123
Included in
Art and Design Commons, Art Practice Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Photography Commons
Artist's Statement
I am interested in creating paintings that describe a shift in the perception of reality. A place and time that has the potential to be part of a real world, but that is also operating in a time of its own. I am not interested in recreating dream worlds. I consider my dreams to be the inspiration for my work, but I feel the need to go beyond merely recording them. I feel that I must create, elaborate, and expand my own “mindscapes.” I produce universes where the laws of physics are slightly different, a world populated by beings who look like us and behave similarly to us. A world that we can believe is real, but understand it to be elsewhere, a parallel universe.
My paintings are the visual representation of this parallel universe. I do not want the viewer to just sit back and enjoy the show, as we would while watching a Hollywood movie. The experience should feel more like an experimental film, or a video game where we can go back and forward, stop and start again, manipulating time and the outcome of the story.
Time might seem fleeting and unstoppable from our mortal perspective, but it may not be linear, even if it looks that way to us. In the same perspective, my work should not be read as a linear narrative where there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.
We think in terms of past, present and future. To some, there is only the past, the present does not exist, and the future is only moments filled with potentiality; to others, the past is gone, and the future is not here yet, so all we have is an eternal present, the “now” is all there is, and all there always will be.
In my work I draw inspiration from the past, the present -the now-, and the imagined future. My paintings are just instants brimming with potentiality. My mind has been conditioned with rational knowledge and logical thinking, but I want my paintings to rest on temporal quicksand, an unstable ground where nothing is certain and the observer can make his or her own story.
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/9c6k-x606