Carter: American Painting

“I think one general misconception of my work is that it’s always a form of self-portraiture. It really isn’t. It’s more the idea of portraiture that I’m interested in“,[1] answers American artist and filmmaker Carter when questioned in an interview about his painting and sculptural work.  In his earlier works, Carter used handmade, marbled paper as support background and pasted-on synthetic hair as artificial representation of the corporeal or joined photographs of meticulously decorated, bourgeois interiors from the 1950s and ´60s alongside his signature floating heads, body fragments and brushstrokes, more recently his artistic methods have been essentially changed.

For his third solo exhibition at the Georg Kargl Fine Arts gallery, Carter has swapped the brush for a manual sewing machine; has interwoven towels into the picture support and and has changed his reduced colour range from blue, grey and black to a rich multicoloured spectrum. Although paint is still applied to the surface he has introduced an incredibly detailed stitching using brightly coloured thread. Nevertheless Carter’s artistic style remains unique, distinctive and individual. It consists of subtle variations of repeating colors, such as pink, red, light blue or neon yellow and green. Shapes of hand-sewn faces, meticulously sewn eyes, wide opened mouths with brightly coloured lips and teeth, stuck out tongues and floating heads manically run through his entire new body of work. The facial images live in a space that’s perhaps both absurd or ghastly, yet ultimately are detached from any specific feeling or emotion. Tightly applied to the support, Carter’s blending of the foreground with the partly painted background creates a complete visual space in constructing a dense fabric of references out of formal, semantic and historic allusions.

He casually quotes art historical examples and applies their formal achievements. In his current exhibition, entitled American Painting, he refers directly to his artistic predecessors and his own American tradition. Comparable to Robert Rauschenberg having merged painterly and sculptural elements into his Combine Paintings by incorporating found objects, Carter is using coins with head motives, lace doilies and popular yet dated emblems, which can be read in the long American tradition of quilting or hand-stitched Samplers. Andy Warhol with his analyses of identity constructs, role models and sexuality, Hockney or Picasso’s shattering of the figure into both formal and conceptual Cubist bits, or Cindy Sherman and her play with grotesque masks, costumes  and suppressed fantasies can be seen as points of departure, even if Carter deals with such issues in a more reserved manner. Casting a wider net and referencing the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and '70s and various cults both sinister and peacefully communal, the artist is influenced by the clothing, codified symbols, art and atmosphere of the time.

Speaking in terms of form, Carter’s methods never result in painting, sculpture, photography or drawing as such. His work is all of them and, at the same time, always in-between. In terms of content, it points out that everything connected to gender, sexual, or social identity is never stable or natural, but appears to be the product of a social and cultural process of construction.

Carter's works are not bound to rigid ascriptions, and they never can be. According to the artist's explicit wish , here is a list of the following wikipedia links that gives a broader insight in his artistic engagement over the past few years.