"If representations are ways of structuring the world then to make versions of them and then mess with them can be a way of effecting the world. This all happens for me through touch - action, speed (or lack thereof), the acts of constructing, taking apart and re-constructing a material version of an image. When the kind of painting I do works for me it is really a process of searching for and building a home in images and trying to make a place in the world by doing this. We get to choose our images, we get to own them in some ways, we get to alter and repurpose them, and try to get comfortable with them in our real lives. All the while, the social entities that are supplying these things to us are doing it with their own motives and manipulations. Touching, owning, re- working, and re-inventing the given world is how I think of what a certain kind of hand making is all about. Hand making is a strong political gesture for me, even if it is just doodling on a handout during a meeting. It is a way of indexing real human desires and movements often in response to something that tends to push the real human aside. I have no idea how my work might function for others, but in my mind I am enacting these processes every time I work." - Andreas Fischer
Each of Andreas Fischer’s paintings is a conundrum, positing itself simultaneously as a mirror, a window, an arena, as a form of escape and an indexical confrontation with who he, the artist, and we, his viewers, think we are. So too, Fischer’s paintings put forth propositions, statements, mixed-messages, affirmations, apologies and perhaps most importantly, a series of open-ended questions. In this way, Fischer’s paintings combine the metaphorical, the lyrical and the literal as they enact the questions and struggles of what it means to be human together, with and through the medium of painting.
