Kon Trubkovich appropriates obsolete technology into contemporary vision.
A memory – rewound and replayed, a moment – captured and recorded, a painting – unique and emotional. These thoughts come to mind when one sees Kon Trubkovich‘s recent series of paintings. The ultimate effect of all these elements is a scratched-out tape like effect on images that meaningful and personal to the artist, but broadly representational of a universal set of emotions.
When a single second is fractured into the very frames that it is made up of, the emotional connotation of an already personal moment intensifies. This is exactly what happened with the artist’s first series of the style “Mama”. Plucking one second from the home video of the last party that the artist’s mother hosted in USSR before moving to USA in the 1990s, the artist recreated the moment and augmented it by breaking it down up to the smallest measure of time – 24 frames. By recreating each of the 24 frames into large-scale bordering abstract paintings, it almost feels like Kon is paying homage to the hazy yet clear moment stacked away in the deepest part of the mind. This whole process of creating and stashing memories, only to pull them up again sometime in a slightly vague form is such a natural process that Kon’s work seems to be an extension of that natural instinct.
For The Armory Show, the Chelsea based gallery is presenting Kon’s new paintings of Lenny Bruce – which are the artist’s self-portraits in a way. The distorted, barely recognizable profile views of the well-known stand-up comedian & social critic are the artist’s placeholders for himself. One painted in grayscale, and the other in rich and supple shades of blue, these large paintings are fantastic works that expand the moment for it to have a timeless, forever quality.
Video interview transcript on page 2
