Peter Spanjer

Artist Peter Spanjer creates abstracted print work, made up of layers of sensuality and sexuality, as well as contrasting softness and vulnerability. In particular, he chooses themes that can be traced to personal battles with breaking away from strict gender roles within a black household. As part of his abstracted print series ‘Eros’, Spanjer presents new and energetic prints addressing ideas of conflict and resolution. In comparison to earlier works in the ‘Eros’ series, Spanjer gives a very different tempo to these new works. Spanjer makes these new prints intensely energetic, lacking in control and focused on colourful abstraction.

For this series, he uses extracts from gay & black adult movies, compiling and transforming them into abstracted prints. Once he has used the footage to make stills, he then destroys the clip. In many ways, through this Spanjer challenges how we might aesthetically identify sex within gay culture and view gay black men. However, he doesn’t attempt this through overt sexualisation or historical connotations but rather as complex strokes of vibrant colour.

Spanjer refers to his ‘Eros’ prints as ‘digital paintings’, each work so abstracted from it’s original form. All in all, Spanjer adapts them to a point where they are almost unrecognisable as erotic stills. He intends for the pieces to feel familiar, as if the viewer were looking at a painting. Crucially, he protects the under-layer and true origin of these works through his vibrant abstraction of them. He implores viewers to really use their imagination to see the erotic underbelly of each piece. Simultaneously, for some viewers, the origin may never be seen as he abstracts the footage to an unrecognisable form.