Statement
Painting has problems, but also many possibilities, not to mention many lives. I’m certainly not the first to wrestle with its issues and trace these incarnations. But if many of my projects cross genres and disciplines—sculpture, installation, digital art, and graphic narrative—they also derive from my practice as a painter. Most often I think like one, as well, searching for a synoptic image that says everything without being didactic—without, that is, being too much on the nose. In this effort I treat each body of work as a distinct inquiry responding to a larger question: For instance, what is the contemporary experience of the sublime? Or, how can one articulate the malaise conditioned by today’s crises and seemingly endless wars? Or, perhaps more broadly, how can painting engage the outside world given a state of increasing mediation? If the screen has indeed replaced the canvas, what does one now do with painting, which sometimes appears antiquated, like opera, or worse, like chamber music?
To answer this last one, I’ve come to regard painting as a discourse—an “apparatus,” as art historian, Helmut Draxler, called it—that informs other media while allegorizing the historical events and pressures of our time. Beyond the medium’s often hermetic language and traditional distribution network (galleries, museums, homes), I seek out public, or popular, platforms—a belief in access conditioned by my Russian upbringing and immigrant experience at the end of the Soviet regime. My childhood, first spent wandering The Hermitage with its Rubens rooms and then later hanging out and bagging “floppies” at Jimmy’s Comics in 1980s Bronx, etched these two poles of my artistic compass: one pointing to the few, the other, to the many.
Today, this ethos and our flattened aesthetic terrain inspire my forays into public art, freely accessible digital works, and, most recently, comics, with its vernacular rooted in ancient pictographs, working class struggles, and rich political history. In many ways, my current comics work has brought me full circle to Jimmy’s, unearthing the complex and often progressive language that first introduced me to “America” and the West. It’s also helped me express longstanding concerns from different angles: If the contemporary sublime fascinated me before, few mediums offer synesthetic excess like comics. If painting and public art demand that we pilgrimage to them, graphic narrative brings its dynamic brew of painting, film, and literature directly to us—to our local bookstores, laptops, and phones.
My writing, pursued professionally since 2011, has also been integral to these peregrinations. Spanning fiction, theory, criticism, and the graphic novel, it continues challenging my studio practice, testing my assumptions while propelling my work towards more nuanced interpretations of high and low as well as greater overlaps between image and text. Whether encountered in art history, film, graphic narrative, photography, the Internet, or painting, these overlaps still compel me most—those moments when the past commingles with the present, the elevated blurs with the banal, and critical reflection merges with daydreaming, envisioning potential futures.” —Peter Rostovsky
About the Artist
Peter Rostovsky is a Brooklyn-based, Russian-born artist and writer who emigrated from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee in 1980. His paintings and fine art have been shown widely in the US and abroad and exhibited at museum venues such as PS1/MoMA, The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, Artpace, The Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K. Ghent, as well as a host of private galleries. His writing—often under the pen name David Geers—has appeared in the magazines October, Fillip, BOMB, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Unbag, and Frieze, and spans cultural criticism, art writing, and fiction. Meanwhile, his illustrated fiction and comics-based work has appeared in the Third Rail Quarterly, Unbag, Topic, in Devil’s Due’s much publicized “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force” and “Bernie” anthologies, as well as the Ringo Award-nominated “Pandemix” anthology. Rostovsky currently teaches at NYU, Parsons New School, and Lesley Art + Design. His debut graphic novel, “Damnation Diaries,” was released in September 2023 with Uncivilized Books.