Description
‘I’m Sure It’ll be Alright’ by Zach Mendoza
Artist: Zach Mendoza
Title: ‘I’m Sure It’ll be Alright’
Medium: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 14″ x 11″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2021
About the Artwork:
“I’ve become very fascinated lately with the psychology of self-destruction in my works. I think that there is a heartbreaking and incredibly relatable aspect to seeing this behavior in others. When someone can no longer hide their internal turmoil, it manifests physically and spills out into externalities.
I wanted to paint a portrait of someone instead imploding, making the internal expression of the various marks on one’s psyche become the surface of the face. The weight of problems twisting themselves into the lines of this unnamed person’s countenance. Working from old black and white stills or screen-shot videos of actors I have no knowledge of has been a very interesting way to work lately. I think that knowing nothing about a subject can sometimes be a way to begin an image that becomes a visual manifestation of ideas rather than a likeness.” – Zach Mendoza
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
My work is often a mishmash of ideas, images, half- truths and afterimages that become almost ghoulish amalgams of the sum of their parts. I find myself preoccupied with images that deal with chaos. Francis Bacon once said “I want a very ordered image but I want it to come about by chance”.
The dichotomy of chaos and order, I find are recurrent themes in my work. There are marks that come about independent of reason or expectation and these are the moments which either destroy a work or elevate it to the “not- yet-known”. Working in this way requires a constant process of disruption, reinterpretation and response. I view this process also as a microcosmic expression of the world in which we live. Everything changes constantly, is broken and reassembled an infinitude of times over in every moment. Painting, despite this, is a stagnant form of picture-making. A painting does not move like a film or animation, however, it is also very different form a photo. Painting is a unique medium that has endured throughout centuries and will for centuries hence forth, as long as there are stubborn romantic idealists like myself who aim to advance a dialogue about what it means to be alive in a beautiful medium that, unlike the rest of our world, doesn’t move.