About

G4, four Amsterdam-based artists with a long trajectory in the art scene, got together, almost unwillingly, to put an end to the current situation. Something needed to be done.  Photography, the medium that is most associated with the truth, is, according to G4’s manifesto, their enemy, a medium for vacation and weekend time-passing: “It illustrates imbalance of the mind…a leery way”. They decided to replace the unquestioned authenticity of the photograph with “The Painting”.  Apart from this artistic conviction, they all shared a strong rejection and anger towards organized religion: “Those Christian dogs killed any possibility of reason and accountability”. Four painters united against the fallacy of photographic image and Christian tradition convey their urge on their large “anti-history” paintings. By using mostly photography based images to create their works, they strip their enemy from its so-called authority, leaving it unarmed, deconstructed and decontextualized. They paint their canvases together, each piece being made by all of them as a group. Redefining today’s understanding of collective, each work bears the name of the group, challenging the western idea authorship. Images related to present or historical events are sought and extracted from the Internet, themes are selected, images mixed and painted by all four. G4, a name given by the lack of the letter “g” in all their names, works as a painting machine, bringing medieval artisan working methods, -a group of painters facing the task of completing whole fresco murals,- together with today’s global digital collage,-  images, used and re-used, manipulated and re-contextualized by billions of users. Acting as a plural force and using media images of recent events, G4 gives a new turn to history painting, or as Spanish curator Paco Barragan would put it: it signals “the return of (anti-) history painting”, a genre that reflects upon historical events but that is far from the 19th century “history machines” that glorified kings, other characters, battles or other course-changing events, by virtue of either memory or story-telling. The new history or anti-history painting, in the manner of G4, makes use of mass media images to elaborate a story, a painted collage of our bloody recent history, not one to be glorified but one that presents an uncomfortable, and often non-existing truth.