Keith Tolch

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.keithtolch.com

City / State: Los Angeles, CA

Emerging from a place of pixelated edges and backlit wire-framed spaces, my work engages with the resistance of an impenetrable surface. The formal structure of digital space and the peculiar landscapes and theoretical environments of video games and operating systems provide me with an access point to visual architectures unique to my digitally enmeshed moment in history.

These visual elements coalesce into an experience that approximates painting. A unique vocabulary and an identity of mark making, pictorial space, and formal relationships materialize. The latent potential of marks is rendered active, expressing moments of extreme amplitude nested between the lowest possible frequencies. It is here, in the lows, where possibility is inverted and compounded, stultified, broken down, and—without resignation—transformed.

These peculiarities belong to a specific moment within the expansive history of painting. I position myself at this vantage point as a reflective surface, a relay of sorts, internalizing and expressing outwardly a very particular and quirky understanding of where painting has been, has not been, and may still go.