jay rechsteiner
home artworks statement & cv contact
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DER ANDERE TOD HINTER DEM MORD.
das unvereinbare in ein gedi cht:
die ordnun g.
und der riss, der sie zerbrich.From the poem “Hamlet gegen Shakespeare” by Thomas Brasch. The fragmentation reflects the tension between structure and rupture
- between poetic order and irreconcilable violence.
This project is an evolving enquiry into how we see, construct, and distort violence.
It began with the Bad Painting series and expanded into experimental video, sculpture, and performance. The work is not about illustrating events but dislocating them - through juxtaposition, absurdity, and disruption. I use language, imagery, and material failure to ask what is seen, what is hidden, and what we choose to ignore.
Intro / Project
Bad Painting Juxtapositions
Text / Video Experiments
Blind War Mask / Performances
Catalogue / Writing
Fragments / Failures / Reflections
New Experiments /
Moving Image & Material
Intro / Project Concept
This project is an ongoing inquiry into rupture, failure, and the emotional void at the heart of contemporary life. It began as a self-directed residency in Italy, where I explored new forms of juxtaposition - placing my Bad Paintings alongside AI-generated images of leisure, wealth, or staged happiness. Since then, the project has grown into a series of experiments with text, image, material, and performance.
At its centre is a refusal: a refusal to beautify violence or resolve discomfort. Using painting, moving image, masks, and unscripted action, I seek to expose the emotional dissonance between what we consume and what we look away from. I do not work toward a polished final product. I work toward understanding - toward revealing the conditions that shape and distort how we see.
Bad Paintings
Bad Painting 17: Three men having a great time while two dogs are savaging a fox in a cage.
20cm x 25cm, acrylic on canvas, 2013Bad Painting 204: A man is kicking a cat while his friends are filming him. They will share the footage on social media.
22.7cm x 30.5cm, acrylic on canvas, April 2021
Bad Painting 393: A group of enslaved workers sharing a one-bedroom flat.
22.7cm x 30.5cm, oil on canvas, November 2024
See all Bad Paintings HERE
Bad Painting Juxtapositions
A series of staged tensions between my Bad Paintings and AI generated images and texts
Painting 317: Man forcing woman to watch porn
Juxtaposed with a bold, upside-down triangle of text: “The rich can only exist because the poor do.”→ Explores complicity, power and obscene privilege.
Soiano, Italy 19 June 2025
Painting 195: Five young men kill a swan and display it with a “not welcome” sign where a Roma family camps
Displayed beside a large video of a sparkling blue pool and colourful floaties — a jarring contrast of peace and menace.→ The violence disappears into aesthetic pleasure.
Soiano, Italy 20 June 2025
Painting 380: Woman violently arrested at a pro-Palestine protest
Flanked by two men eating ice cream: one obese and shirtless on a beach, the other elegant in a suit in a luxury lounge.Soiano, Italy 21 June 2025
“Creating knowledge is establishing connections between forms, gestures, accidents. The Bad Painting series is not just about what I see. It’s about why I keep painting.”
Video & Text experiments
Explorations in layering visual calm with textual violence.
POOL VIDEO, ITALY
I float through a sun-drenched pool.
Overlaid text: lines from Bad Paintings - violence, fear, denial.
Displayed (reformatted) on flatscreen next to the phrase:
“The only reason why I paint is fear.”Soiano, Italy 22 June 2025
VERONA AIRPORT VIDEO
Taxiing footage through the airplane window.
Again, Bad Painting phrases appear over the screen — detached and ominous.
Flight and flightlessness.Italy 25 June 2025
I continued filming - this time a quiet scene of myself walking slowly through the garden, simply looking at things, as if nothing mattered. There’s no drama, just heat and stillness. I overlaid the footage with extracted text fragments from Bad Painting, then screened it on a flatscreen TV placed outside, exposed to the elements. The passivity of the moment contrasted sharply with the violence of the words - a kind of suspended indifference.
Margate, UK 30 June 2025
Installation: Flatscreen TV placed in a room or garden showing pool footage from Soiano. Text nearby reads: “The only reason I paint is fear.”
1 July 2025 Margate, UK
“I search for connections, not always finding them. I work not to complete, but to understand what compels me to continue.”
Blind War Mask / Performances
Material experiments with failure, protection, and absurdity.
BLIND WAR MASK I
I constructed my first mask - chicken wire, PVA, paper - and filmed myself blindly navigating the garden. The result is absurd and slightly comic: an artist staggering, reaching for a stick, trying to weaponise it. A layered soundtrack overlays my Bad Painting texts, read in fractured, overlapping voices.Margate, UK 7 July 2025
DUAL-CHANNEL VIDEO WITH DELPHINE
Two silent recordings side by side: me, masked and flailing in the garden; Delphine in a Beetlejuice-style costume, playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik on the piano. Juxtaposed, the videos become strange and theatrical - one violent, one serene.
BLIND WAR MASK iiWITH SPEAR
The second mask introduced canvas fragments from failed Bad Paintings - reintroducing painting not as surface but as skin. I also constructed a long fighting stick from an old Christmas tree stem, wrapped in the same canvas.
We filmed a short, blind 'battle' in the garden: Delphine in Mask I, me in Mask II - staggering, colliding, unsure who we’re fighting.Margate, UK 13 July 2025
“I am in experimental territory. I don’t always know what I’m doing - and I think that’s the point.”
Footage still: Delphine wearing first blind war mask. Filmed during material tests for mask-based work.
Mask made from paper, wire, and PVA.
“This is not a finished work, but part of an ongoing enquiry into fragmentation, opacity, and the breakdown of language.”
New Experiments / Moving Image & Material
These experiments are extensions of Bad Painting, though no longer bound by the frame.
There are no subjects, only glimpses: walls, sky, plants, and silence.
No compositions, only atmospheres.
What began in painting continues here as an enquiry into the unspectacular - as if the canvas had been peeled back and left in the wind.
Nezerine, Croatia
28 July 2025
Catalogue + Writing
As the project unfolds, I will compile a catalogue reflecting its conceptual and visual evolution. This will include notes, images, unfinished works, and textual fragments such as those shown throughout this page.
The Catalogue
This is not a traditional retrospective, but a fragmentary record of an ongoing, process-based investigation. It includes:
– Documentation of selected Bad Paintings
– Experiments in juxtaposition
– Stills from performances and videos
– Extracted texts and reflective fragmentsThe catalogue will be produced as a limited physical run, distributed to curators, peers, and institutions. A free digital version will also be available online.
It mirrors the core themes of the work - rupture, opacity, instability - and serves as a lasting trace of the process, open to future conversations, collaborations, and invitations.
Fragments / Failures / Reflections
This project does not move in a straight line. It accumulates — through moments of confusion, rupture, and stillness. Failed gestures, abandoned objects, discarded materials - these are not mistakes, but part of the enquiry.
The following fragments reflect that space between intention and collapse:
Scraps of Paintings
Offcuts and used floor coverings from previous Bad Paintings — walked on, painted over, repurposed for masks and sculpture. They are no longer paintings, but carriers of residue.
Mask Prototypes
Early masks made from chicken wire and paper — sometimes too fragile to wear, or too grotesque to use. Kept anyway. Part of the thinking.
Video Clips That Led Nowhere
Footage without conclusion. Silent walks. Loops of hesitation. Backgrounds without protagonists.
Materials that didn't behave
Canvas that warped, wire that snapped, glue that peeled away. Each became its own kind of question.
.
This is not a retrospective of polished work.
It’s a gathering of the broken.
A document of trying..
"I scratch at the surface, and all I reveal is darkness. I keep scratching until I reach an endless brick wall. I have no tool to break it down. I use my hands, my fingernails, but the wall is too hard, too thick, too solidly built. What lies behind it? I begin to imagine things hidden there - but what I see are only altered reflections, distorted versions of the world on my side of the wall. How can I break through?"
Copyright © 2015, Jay Rechsteiner. All Rights Reserved.
