Christiaan Diedericks
Cold Sweat
In many ways I aim to “rewrite” history in my work and the dominant sense of self-awareness that informs most Western art practices. I am trying to present contemporary issues such as Difference as timeless, by situating my vocabulary of images and themes in an organic flux of dreams, history, news, commercial detritus, hyperreality, and unvoiced feelings and forces of biological nature/desire.
In my latest body of work, Cold Sweat, I aimed to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable driving forces of postmodern consciousness – the desire for Otherness and the fear of losing autonomy. Herein lies the connection between my (sometimes) random imagery – images borrowed from contemporary culture, digital images, my own drawings, photographs and (often) autobiographical imagery. I am always aiming to juggle disparate images to make them correspond without collapsing into one particular style, mode of thought, emotion, or art-historical reference. Through the juxtaposition of Self and human nature, I attempt to create a new language of images appropriate to the psychological realities of our age.
