Andres Manniste
My work deals with my presence in a world that has changed considerably since 1999. I am aware that I belong to a historical period that was before Facebook and Tumblr. I have none of the experience of the people that I teach. I am working with photographic images, many of them anachronisms that I choose dependent on a particular mood, as if my age and experience somehow allows that sort of discretion. I paint the works very carefully, as if I was printing a four colour separation. I make them very large as to make it difficult to look at them as discrete images. Close up they make more sense because you participate in the experience of making the paintings by examining them for their visual and tactile properties. As my paintings become more recognizable, I proceeed to cover them, to bury them in random layers of paint until the result is a half recognizable, partly obscured image that speaks more of the experience of being in a studio, of coming from a particular historic time when the studio was important, from a time when the computer monitor was still a wonderous thing.
Born in 1951, Andres Manniste has been working with the communications technologies since 1993. He has consistently factored these technological and critical environments into his projects. Educated as a painter and printmaker, he has participated in many solo and group exhibitions over his career and has been the recipient of several important prizes including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Ministry of Culture. His work can be found in public collections including the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Heritage Collection of the Quebec Archives, and the Canada Council Art Bank. Andres lives and works in Montreal.