Ian Gonczarow Presentation

About

Based here at the Drill Hall, Ian is a painter and tutor at Edinburgh College of Art.

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One cannot make sense of the world all at once.

Visually and aesthetically the paintings often resemble Jumbled collage, direct juxtapositions or standalone mise-en-scene. They are also a collage of painting style or genre and adopt multiple application techniques that enable different impressions of images to be produced. Sometimes they resemble the multiple overlapping open windows of a laptop screen. Pictures have to make visual sense to me in a way that broadly connects back to real events in the world. That does not mean that I make relatable pictures or pictures that tell a particular story in any linear fashion. It means the pictures do have to ‘fit in’ to an ongoing world building vernacular.

I am a painter because what painting allows me to do, is to filter imagery from the world, not all of it beautiful or interesting and transform it into something I can comprehend because I rebuilt it. The perspective for the practice is that of the powerless or passive onlooker. The context of the painting is one of personal fear of and for the world in which it is created. Any subtext within the paintings therefore, often alludes to notions of a geopolitical position or stance on subjects of fantasy, abuse, trauma memory, economics and nightmares.