Peter Spanjer

In his video print ‘Eros 15’, artist Peter Spanjer presents erotic abstracted imagery. He compiles his ‘Eros’ series, with vibrant and abstract prints that are suggestive of duplicity and layered meaning. Spanjer refers to these video print works as ‘digital paintings’, primarily due to their painterly, vibrant finish. He bases each print on extracted film stills, originally taken from gay black adult movies. What once was erotic and explicit visual imagery, Spanjer now has made into abstract and vibrant prints.

In these alluring works, he transforms naked and sexualised narrative into censored shapes and forms. For his ‘Eros’ prints, he proposes and questions how we aesthetically identify sex within queer culture. And in particular, through this he questions how gay black men are seen in society and the contemporary art world. Through subtle strokes of colour and muted forms, Spanjer does not overtly refer to the sexualised background these images derive from. Instead, he abstracts them, subsequently changing their meaning and where their importance sits.

“There are feelings of denial with what inspired the work in the first place because of how removed it feels. It was interesting to re-imagine the black body and repurposing the original purpose of the work. That for me was the most exciting.”

As an idea of abstraction, Spanjer creates visual suggestion in each ‘Eros’ work, he allows viewers to imagine a narrative for themselves. In each, he allows imagination to become crucial to each viewer’s understanding of them. As well as this, he reveals another aspect of the works in the environment each work ends up in. In particular, the environment each work is placed in enhances the way in which they are seen, explicit or aesthetic.