Peter Spanjer

In Peter Spanjer’s body of colour print work, crucially he aims to confront his own sensitivities. This manifests through research on self evaluation and engrained cultural narratives. Spanjer’s work challenges an internalised belief system, in particular he tries to pull apart ‘ideas of blackness’ within the contemporary art world.

For his ‘Eros’ series, he chooses gay & black adult films as the subject of these vibrant prints. Importantly, in his process he uses the video as the starting point to extract stills from, once he completes this he destroys the film. For Spanjer, the medium becomes something that is interchangeable and that adapts through his making process. As an artist, he focuses on fluidity in his practice as he moves across different media to find what is right for each work.

For Spanjer, he focuses on the journey of collecting the imagery as a process in itself. In the making of these prints, in particular he conjures themes of conflict. Mostly, this stems from unanswered and unresolved questions. In the same way, he addresses ‘intention’ in his work. Most often, he makes decisions of whether the work will end up as a moving image or still image. All in all, Spanjer creates his colour print work from a very personal place whilst he addresses personal resolutions. He uses conflict and resolution as two ideals to work from, his interest lying in standing with conflict and addressing it. For these new prints, Spanjer intended the works to be far more explicit than they became, due to the nature of the imagery he used. An equally important aspect to his process, is to analyse the original source to a point of eventual abstraction.