Tobias Batz

Tobias Batz' work, a fusion of fashion photography and street art, is a respectful celebration of the female sprit. It reflects the urban landscape of New York City and its inhabitants. His cutting edge use of photography, body painting, spray paint and experimental methods of digital processing pays homage to Andy Warhol, Frederico Fellini, Man Ray and edgy fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon.

These works of art can only be called “pictures,” not “paintings,” or “drawings,” for he creates them with paint, and drawing, and photography, and digitized electronic synthesis and editing, a “palate” of all the means that the 21st Century offers to the visual artist.

Why not use them all freely interchangeably and synergistically in single works of art? Why not? You really think that given the chance Leonardo DaVinci wouldn’t have computer enhanced some of his paintings? Or that the late Renaissance Dutch hyper-realists wouldn’t have creamed in their velvet jeans to have been able to play with real photography instead of mere camera obscura?

Tobias Batz knows this very well, using paints, dyes, photos, Photoshop, computer synthesis, whatever, to create images of his urban dreamers, by a 21st. Century artist who has been one of them, and for the evolution of this multi-mode palette as the dominant creative mode of 21st. Century art. An art in which the multiplex means of its creation is entirely unbound and beside the true point of all visual art. Sorry Marshall McLuhan, but in the 21st Century, the medium is not the message, but only a delivery system for the message. The message is not the means with which it was created or the material matrix in which it exists. The message is the image itself.

Comments

[Dipesh]

I suppose it deepdns what inspired you in the first place. For me, photography was a way to capture what I did not have the talent to draw, or at least draw quickly. So I would take pictures, then try to draw those pictures in multiple modes, suhc as the Van Gogh mode (and if you don't know what I mean, maybe you should go to an art museum for inspiration). Also, I've found that (literally) not having my equipment for a few months while starting to feel that lack of inspiration is giving me tremendous inspiration, as I just got it back this evening, and can't wait to go take pictures tomorrow! So, take a deep breath, put down the camera, pick out your favorite pictures and try to draw them, or go to museums and try to capture the feeling you get from a drawing or painting in your camera, or possibly you just need to ask a friend to hold on to your equipment indefinitely. When you find your hands itching for a camera, it's time for you to go get it back.