Of course there were certain social motivations behind Marker’s work that I find intriguing. Also the duration of his films and the endurance they required are fascinating to me. His work deals in large part with the question of how to remember things in and through film in a particular manner. Syberberg grapples with how to reimagine history in an ethical way and how to be able to dream it. On the other hand his treatment was felt at the time to be transgressive precisely because he used real documentary evidence to shape that reimagining. Marker got to the point where he displayed a certain wariness towards existing images. This is true of the images I work with myself, and, in the best cases, hopefully leads the viewer to a questioning of and healthy distrust towards them.

It seems that in your own painterly practice the act of forgetting is a very important element. I’m thinking in particular of how you’ve talked about the “memory-free zone between conception and execution.”

Of course an image is never something that just falls out of the sky; its choice is always directed by existing elements. Those elements are moreover never simply what they are, by which I mean they can take on several layers of meaning and distort themselves in the process. Then you get, well, not really a problem, but you do become faced with the necessity of making choices. What’s important in that process, and what I aim for, is doing so in a singular manner—to focus, which is where the act of painting becomes important. You shouldn’t forget that painting is a very physical medium that always leaves traces of how something was painted. By the way, I started out as a very gestural, fairly impulsive painter using a dry color palette, which I reduced precisely because of all those layers of meaning, and also to create sufficient distance from what I wanted to express with painting. Now I’ve de-emphasized the gestural brushstroke and tried not to cultivate a particular style. Of course after a good 400 paintings you accumulate something akin to a style, but that is not something you consciously aim for. It’s more something you need to reduce to the level of habit. That habit is essential, however, essential in its integrity.

In that context, does the recurring critique of your work as having a certain style that is said to function somewhat akin to a “Photoshop filter”—in the sense that it can be applied to any subject, with the effect of equalizing all subjects—particularly bother you?

It’s a very literal critique that stems from ignorance. I’m someone who takes an extremely long time before even starting to paint. The choice of images, the content of those images, is of essential importance for me in terms of meaning. Which is probably the reason why it may seem I can paint just about anything with relative ease. Now, you can indeed paint anything, so this criticism is already a tad odd to start with. At the same time, exactly because you can make an image about anything, I am making a choice by painting the things I paint, and that choice is always determinant. It determines the way the picture shows itself, and even pragmatically the way it is concretely made. It’s a type of critique that emerges from a consciously inflated discourse that juxtaposes new media with a very archaic understanding of painting. But that is not my discourse.

On the contrary, it often feels like paintings of yours that depict subjects that could be classified as banal sometimes seem more horrific than the actual horrors you paint.

What do you mean by “actual horrors”?

Body [1990], for instance . . .

Body is a doll I used to have as a child, which opens up with a zipper and could be stuffed to give the body volume. So that is not something I would classify as horrific. When I first started showing my work, many interpreted it as intimate, withdrawn, introverted, and poetic, none of which it was. Then there was a period when I was accused of nostalgia, which was not accurate either, because nostalgia in my eyes is actually truly a notion related to horror. After that came more perfidious readings, emphasizing negative elements—like the sinister, the surgical, the distanced—which again weren’t explanations of the images.