Artist's Statement - Cedric Vanderlinden - Against the Dying of the Light

MOTIVATION
We are lost and atomized in the pervasive systems of Late-Stage Capitalism. We are adrift, detached from the anchors of purpose, a sense of community, and our place in history. We substitute technological gimmickry and development for meaningful cultural events. We consume nostalgia, irony, and self-reference as substitutes for purpose.

Everything is reduced to a dollar value, even our intimate thoughts or moments spent with loved ones. Social media has seen to that. We exist in Mark Fisher’s self-imposed and self-policed ahistorical Capitalist Realism, where it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Isolated and alienated, we race towards our doom, chasing “clout,” money… things. We can see no alternative because “capitalism occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” It has us starved and has become, in a very real sense, the final terror: not annihilation, but a permanent, ahistorical, joyless, eternal now.

The COVID-19 Pandemic left me, as it had so many artists, unable to exhibit and sell art to generate an income. This was a revelatory episode. It allowed me to rediscover the process of artmaking, free from commercial pressures within which I had existed for too long. I no longer had to make things, I could focus on the joy of discovery, the intrinsically human need to make a mark, to be in the unfettered moment of creation.

And it is in those moments that I feel something close to the Romantic: an instance of transcendence and connection in the face of oblivion. These moments are mine, beyond monetization and commodification. These unfettered moments of creation seem to be the last holdout against a labyrinth of self-imposed social systems.

This is why, for the last few years since the lockdowns, I have resisted exhibiting and making art for commercial purposes, focusing instead on making art for its own sake.

ARTIST STATEMENT
To know ourselves, we must know our place in time. And that necessitates a sensitivity to, and engagement with, the plethora of narratives and histories that make up the texture of our experiences. In other words, self-actualization requires an internal, personal, and cultural archaeological, sometimes palaeontological, excavation.

The current schizophrenic political and capitalist Zeitgeist actively opposes this undertaking. It doesn’t want us to be self-possessed and self-aware. It functions best when we are trapped in an atemporal, a-cultural, neo-libertarian eternal now, where everything is short-lived, and nothing is new. Structures like long-term employment are replaced by the gig economy, meaningful narrative replaced by nostalgia and ironic nods, movies are dominated by brands and “universes,” and technological gimmicks and cosmetic advances have replaced social and cultural engagement. We are adrift and no longer have a place in time, in the shadow of an existential crisis to end everything.

My paintings are a perhaps futile act of rebellion against this status quo. They are the evidence of a personal dialectic archaeological process. They are, by that definition, never finished, but rather snapshots and signposts along a longer road. They are an invitation to the viewer to undertake a similar analysis of the works, themselves, and their place in time. This may, hopefully, lead to a transcendental encounter with the Sublime Terror where we find ourselves.

These art objects are built up in successive layers, some representative and some not, some completed and some not. For this, I prefer the medium of painting in general (although I am not against some mixed media), and oil painting in particular, due to its plasticity, ease of use, and ease of manipulation. It allows for a better interaction with other layers – I can mix, I can obfuscate, I can reveal. The results are not representative, but rather abstract and suggestive. Any images that are found in the results are there merely through illusion and pareidolia. Each layer emerges from a reflexive process, seeded from only the barest of elements, where I respond accordingly to the aesthetic and compositional demands of the work.

The artworks seek to mimic our experience of time as a messy layering of subjective narratives, evident in emergent strange quirks, cognitive dissonances, and mutating expressions. If everything we know is built on the ruins of a past which we actively reinvent, reinterpret, overwrite, and seek to erase, so too are my paintings.