peter WILDE

Peter Wilde, 42 Obamas

We are immersed in the digital age were our profile picture makes our first impression. In a way it is our self-portrait, and it is how we represent ourselves. Facebook let’s us have five thousand friends, but how is it possible to actually know these people? We relate to each other through digital images, but how do we actually know someone in the digital age?

Peter Wilde plays with notions of public and private, he questions and explores how people present themselves through social media. Wilde replaces painting from life with digital images, because the digital image is life.

In the Obama series Wilde paints from the first image Obama uploaded on Facebook. He uses the profile picture as a form of appropriated realism. Wilde takes the portrait of Obama that launched his candidacy in 2007, the image the world knows, and transforms it through paint in a humorous and affectionate attempt to humanize Obama. Wilde states, “Obama’s Facebook profile seemed to be an invitation to know him intimately.” How does one really know someone’s habits and quirks through social media, let alone the leader of the free world? Is it possible?

Wilde uses the intimacy and warmth of paint to evoke and portray Obama’s personality. He captures the refined, elegant, imprecise, vague, muzzled, sightless, commanding, formidable, and powerful sides of the leader. He says, “I wanted to know if I painted the same image enough if I could know him intimately, knowing that I could not.” A digital images does not breath, blink, sweat, and it does not smell. The digital image is perfect, and there is no room for those awkward moments that make us human.

The paintings are about paint as much as they are about subject. There is a clear fondness to the medium and subject. Each painting informs and leads to the next painting. Wilde created a system that was clearly irrational. He states, “The planned failed constructed strategy was seeing the profile on Facebook as an invitation to intimacy...”

-Samuel Jablon, Associate Art Editor, Guernica Magazine, 2013