Bad Painting 365

Bad Painting 365: Man throwing rubbish into someone's front garden.

22.7cm x 30.5cm
oil on canvas
May 2024

About Bad Painting

'Bad Painting' comprises faux-naïf style artworks addressing real human atrocities, each featuring a descriptive text sourced from various headlines. Painted on canvases approximately laptop screen-sized, they employ bold brushstrokes to convey immediacy. Despite potentially discomforting content, they serve as vital records of humanity's darker aspects in the contemporary era. In today's turbulent world, with shifting societal norms, moral values, and political ideologies, their relevance, especially its textual component, is amplified, capturing the zeitgeist and reflecting societal shifts.
 

Importantly, each "Bad Painting" is not only a visual but also a linguistic entity. The incorporated texts, constructed from various headlines related to specific events, are an integral part of each work. Through this fusion of image and text, I invite viewers to delve not only visually but also linguistically into the deep corners of our collective reality.

The inspiration for all my "Bad Paintings" comes from my personal feelings of anger, sadness, and dismay about such events. These emotions deeply stir me, and painting allows me to process and understand these feelings both emotionally and intellectually.
 

I do not intend for the paintings to take a side or make a political statement. They are based on factual events. Whatever the viewers feel or think is personal to them and of secondary importance. My goal is to present the reality and let the viewers draw their own conclusions.
 

For all "Bad Paintings" up to number 357, I used acrylic paint on canvas. From number 358 onwards, I switched to oil on canvas. I chose acrylic paint for its fast-drying properties and its plastic-like texture, which resonates with our fast-paced world. I transitioned to oil because I simply enjoy working with it. The style can be described as faux-naïf, which aligns with the concept by being crude, ugly, and fast, offering a different perspective to the work.

Bad Painting transcends individual pieces; it's a unified corpus. As such, I'm hesitant to sell paintings individually. Specifically, I envision sets of 100 paintings (size 22.7cm x 30.5cm paintings) as more or less cohesive works.

Quotes

"These [Jay Rechsteiner's 'Bad Paintings'] look like such great paintings."
- Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic at New York Magazine

“Jay’s bad paintings are bad for late corporate fascism, bad for Starmer and fake liberals, bad for genocide enablers who pretend they embrace BLM, bad for bourgeois hypocrites. Bad for Reform and Trump. They’re great for art though and great for humanity.”
- Matthew Collings, art critic, writer, broadcaster, and artist
 

“I am a fan of ‘bad painting’: the rough, ‘street’ urgency and messiness of Basquiat, Schnabel and Scharf. Jay puts his own shocking stamp on this genre with paintings of misshapen figures in scenes of extreme cruelty, often spelt out by lines of dead-pan text. His cartoonish, light hearted style and bright, alluring colour make the violent subject matter of tortured immigrants, sadistic police, abused and mutilated women, all the more painful by contrast. He is a painterly equivalent of Christopher Marlowe who dramatises violent events with black humour to underline the reality of human callousness.”
- Susie Hamilton, artist represented by Paul Stolper Gallery

“The Bad Paintings are the most acute observation of our context where the truth is on the forefront “
- Stefan Brüggemann, artist represented by Hauser & Wirth

“Great art is not serving the like-dislike dichotomy/economy of Instagram. The Bad Paintings are disturbing, raw, cruel, immediate and a highly profound archive of the perversity and darkness that comes with (in)human nature. Painters that have the courage to confront themselves and others with such a brutal intensity are hard to find.”
- Micha Wille, artist

"I recall the memory of four high school students standing in front of Jay Rechsteiner's Bad Paintings, amidst all the other ‘funny’ drawings. They were mesmerized by his honesty and no-nonsense approach. His dedication and commitment made his work, at least for me, the heart of the show."
- Olga Scholten, Initiator and Curator of A Perfect Day, www.aperfectday.amsterdam

"Jay Rechsteiner's pictures reveal the dark truth of humanity. The cruel, perverse, abhorrent side of a 'humanity' that resides in many, more in some than in others, or even not at all. Some let loose. Jay Rechsteiner focuses on this, depicting with a loose, almost humorous brushstroke and cheerful coloring what happens daily in every country around the world. These are excesses of brutality, often uncovered and described in newspapers or news reports. Rechsteiner denounces this, holding up a mirror to our self-righteousness, showing what can also happen in our neighborhood, creating an awareness of what truth means. For this, he is sometimes criticized, as if he were celebrating these atrocities. What nonsense! Jay Rechsteiner paints a human side that has always existed and will continue to exist. How do we deal with it?"
- Peter Schlangenbader, artist, curator