RENE RIETMEYER

Changing my life in the 1990s. Without understanding what it was about, I decided to become a contemporary artist. Trying to find my way through the many senseless writings and ideas, I saw this as an intellectual challenge. Much slower as thought, but I did find what and how I wanted to communicate with others through my works. I created Personal Structures focussing on Time – Space - Existence.
In the beginning I loved painting sexual women, but I took this intellectual challenge, my thoughts about what my work should be, very serious. It brought me far away from easy recognizable sex. To say in my work, in the best way possible, what I wanted you to understand, my work had to become non-figurative. There could be no visual recognizable subject anymore. My work became purely the expression of my intellectual me. It took more than 10 years until I finally was able to communicate with other artists about the values I pursued, on the level I wanted. We all grow older, my communication partners are dying, the artworld continuously is going into a very different direction, it seems that there are not many left anymore who are interested in serious sincere content.
Today, meaning expressed in contemporary art is no longer a further development of mankind’s intellectual capabilities, art is increasingly pleasing the taste of masses. Marketing is more and more deciding the direction, directing what we are supposed to like. Money seems increasingly to corrupt us. I love making my artworks, I really find them to be me, I really find that my artworks have a bigger message within them. In addition, I also still like sexuality. Gauguin, Wesselmann, Araki and many others created artworks which depicted the women they had sex with.
I do not want to claim that my photos can be considered contemporary art, with intellectual content, in the way my other works are, but making photos from the woman I share sexual adventures with just feels good, and I am very aware, it is me who still creates, it is me who is still alive.