KARINA PEISAJOVICH | Painting, Light, & Shadow
Question and Answer
KP: I don’t know if somebody wants to ask a question or . . .
Yes, but what’s the question? How I felt about this? Well in the beginning I hated the cables. I mean, it was like fighting with the material I was using. Many people told me, “Why don’t you project from the back using a screen and you would get a better effect?” But I didn’t want to do that. I mean, I didn’t want to hide anything.
When I started to project the lights, and I started to work with these clumsy fixtures—theatrical, big, and black—it was like being in a hardware store. People were asking me why I’m not more proper and more clean with all this equipment that I was not installing very well, but I let the work develop. I mean, I had to develop also these ideas in my installations. Then I started to accept that I was working with cables, and I started to use them more. From these big theater lights I moved to small lights that were better for the piece, because they were like looking at the piece. They looked like people looking at their own light projected.
Audience: Yeah, you have a projected circle of light, that then seems to me masked or shadowed so that it looks like an eclipse of the sun, with light around the edge and dark circle in front.
KP: No, no. It’s a light projection. So the light is—it’s a shadow—sorry, it’s a shadow projection. There is a cut-out paper, the circle, that is hung in the space and projects the shadow, but then I also use filters in other lights to paint the shadows.
Audience: Yeah that’s what I was noticing; it looked like you had a second light in the shadow to make the shadow look like a sphere instead of black . . .
KP: Yeah it’s the second light that is giving volume. So the light and shadow projection is as physical as the material. I mean, maybe the painting on the wall can be seen as less material than the projection.
Audience: My question—at first it looked like you used a convex mirror, perhaps, to reflect the light or a concave mirror. Do you ever use mirrors?
KP: No, I thought about it because it is about reflections, and the light when I’m in the space, and I project the light there, the light is projecting light there, so the reflection is very important and I have to think a lot about it.
Audience: unintelligible
KP: Can you ask me the last part of the question again. Just the question.
Audience: Did those effects [of 9-11] and the way that you were feeling affect the way that you worked? Or were they separate from your work?
KP: The situation you mean. No, I think it was a part—I mean it was so—being there and doing my work—it was so much the same thing, like the personal things were the work, the work was. . . I mean it was a very special time. It was difficult to separate—to be separated from the life because the events were so powerful that you were totally taken over emotionally.
I remember in the ISCP once somebody came, like the second week after September 11, and asked all the artists if we were going to change our work after the event. I said no, because this event is not out of the history. I mean, it’s part of the history, and I’m supposed to be working in real time. I’m supposed to be present in the moment.
Audience: . . .talk about your identity as a painter . . .
KP: What can I say? I don’t know. I mean, being a painter is a—painting is very classical. I think my work is very classical. The act of painting is classical. I mean you can paint in different ways, but when you paint with oil or with acrylic, the real paint—pigment—it’s an atmosphere that you create.
When I moved from the canvas to the space I lost the habit and the routine and maybe the ritual of painting, but I didn’t lose my way of thinking—I mean bi-dimensional. I don’t know; it’s like you are never dealing with real things in painting. It’s always imagination, whatever you paint, even if you paint naturaleza muerta—still-life, it’s an imagination of the thing. You are inventing the colors; you are not putting the object. I think all my work is crossed by these thoughts and this attitude.
Audience: unintelligible
KP: You mean the images. Well, in my paintings I was using geometry that came from the turtle, from the pattern of the turtle. I think when I started to work with light I wanted to get rid of the subject of my painting—of myself, my self-portraits, the self-reference. Although I . . . I mean I refer to my paintings as if I were performing, that they didn’t have references to myself, but it wasn’t true; it was really self portraits. The lights, I think, allowed me to erase—like no shapes, no nothing, no nothing. And then when I started to use shadows it was because I needed to shape. I needed again to have shapes. It was too ethereal, or like celestial, and the shadows were a way to have shapes again, to shape light, to think that light has a shape; it’s not an amorphous thing. 
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