Tom Pazderka - Artist Statement
The Luminous Dark @ CGBF
In 1825, Caspar David Friedrich painted ‘The Sea of Ice,’ a shipwreck scene he imagined taking place in the unexplored vastness of Earth’s Arctic regions. Rather than a depiction of reality, Friedrich’s painting was an early exploration of the human unconscious and a different kind of horizon, one that psychoanalysis would probe decades later. Through this painting, Friedrich sought to explore the emotions he felt after the tragic death of his brother, who as a child fell through a thin sheet of ice and drowned. Friedrich later associated these moods with nature's indifference to human suffering.
More than a century later, artists like Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Zhang Huan began using materials connected to the messages their work was meant to evoke. Beuys used felt and fat in his sculptures—materials symbolizing the horrors of the Holocaust and the harvesting of bodies for the existential purposes of others. Kiefer used straw and dirt to illustrate the political heaviness and cultural burden of post-war Germany. Huan used incense ash collected from temples to alchemically transform images of the Cultural Revolution.
In 2016, two years after moving to Southern California, I began photographing and collecting the ashes of wildfires. Combining the ashes with white oil paint on wood panels that I burned and charred with torches, I painted ‘portraits’ of the ash clouds produced by the fires. Applied in thin, cumulative layers over extended periods, the images of ash clouds emerge from the ashy abyss of the blackened substrate. During the decade I’ve lived in the region, I, like others, had numerous close encounters with the destructive power of these fires. Their danger is an ever-present reality housed within the deep ‘subconscious’ landscape of Southern California. The devastating Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires opened a rift in the Southern California psyche. They were apocalyptic in their reach and eschatological in their dimension, arriving at the precipice of not just a natural but a cultural shift occurring in the country. Today, it’s difficult to see these fires and natural disasters stripped of their political dimension. Symbolically, the fires represent the return of the repressed in the physical manifestation of violent natural forces latent within the psychological and imagined topography of the land. Politically, they are a manifestation of human folly and hubris, an ongoing and failing attempt to subjugate nature to its will.
Two hundred years ago, Friedrich’s painting heralded a new century of progress and discovery in which humanity pitted itself against the natural world. It depicts the breaking of ice in an uncharted, alien arctic landscape, an image anticipating the great age of exploration. To the painter, however, his work was a gestalt of the unconscious, similar to the one proposed a century later by Sigmund Freud and Gaston Bachelard. This multi-level house, where the attic, middle section, and basement symbolize the superego, the ego, and the id, respectively, is a useful analogy. Though he wasn't aware of it, Friedrich’s painting, with its sharp, jagged ice sheets shearing and swallowing not just the ship but also itself, symbolizes the human psyche. This psyche is distant and unattainable, out of reach from ordinary reality, and literally frozen in space and time. As Freud postulated, we can know this space only through inference, by perceiving or witnessing phenomena in relation to it , just as a black hole must be inferred from the causes and effects it has on other bodies around it.
Friedrich was right to think of and depict nature as beautiful but ultimately mysterious, foreboding, dark, and melancholic. The emotions we feel toward nature are personal projections onto an object that is indifferent to us. We anthropomorphize nature to make it somehow ‘closer’ to us. We name mountains, lakes, and forests. We do the same with massive weather events like hurricanes and fires. To name something is to give it a human dimension, to come to terms with its (non)humanity and to exorcise its alienating effects. To name something is also to effectively domesticate it or, worse, to subjugate it. The splitting of the atom was the most extreme form of this subjugation, which is why every atomic bomb and nuclear test had a specific name. A priest must first seek and then call out a demon’s name to cast it out. Artificial Intelligence is our current era’s atomic bomb, with names like Grok, Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, which intentionally obscure AI’s implications for future humanity. This may mark a transition of a backward progress toward a new synthetic spiritual horizon.
Today I can get AI to conjure up an image of a mountainous landscape, and it will instantly oblige. Among the millions of images used to train the AI are hundreds of paintings by Friedrich and his Romanticist followers , who gave us our current notion of what landscape painting is, even if for the Romantics, the symbolism was often its own opposite. All of that tension is elided by the Large Language Models, and what is left is only a pretty picture—a body without organs. Painting the AI-generated or augmented landscape is a way to return at least some of the meaning and intention back into the image.
Tom Pazderka