How can the artistic act be made interesting and new in a time of
sensory overload due to the ubiquitous depiction of nudity? Blunk has been
addressing this question for a long time. A possible answer - his answer - is
the idea of making the figure disappear from his oil paintings by carving it
out of the picture support at the end of the painting process. Instead of
recognizable individuals, abstract surfaces are created in the wood. These
enable the viewer to interpret the figure in their own way.
At the same time, this technique questions our
viewing habits and our deeply stored ideals of beauty. Because the carved
figures in Blunk's nudes can be read as ideal-typical bodies that move in
classical pictorial spaces. The viewer often thinks he recognizes them
immediately, since he encounters them every day in fashion photography, but
also in television and cinema, in erotic or pornographic photography. At first
glance, Blunk walks the fine line between kitsch and over-aestheticized eroticism.
At second glance - and this is where his superficial statement breaks - the
artist leads us into our own visual memory, which allows us to fill the empty
projection surfaces with great certainty. In this way, our subconscious ideas
of beauty and youth, of self-optimization and diet mania are questioned.
