The Post-Internet era is made up of many different parts, and although they exist independently, they are also connected to each other. As the world is getting older, we are surrounded by much more than what we used to perceive years or decades earlier. We are constantly informed by new things, meaning that we can use them directly, but we are also able to relate them to our previous knowledge and to make new relations between the old and the new, the new and the new-er. This implicit principle could be a guideline to the art of Peter Combe, the new guest of our interview section.

Peter Combe is a visual artist based in San Francisco, whose approach to art provides a clear demonstration of these relations. Although he uses the term “impression” to describe the essential properties of his artworks, he says that he wouldn’t “call himself an Impressionist“, as much as he doubts that “Warhol would call himself a Fauvist“. The reference to Warhol may have been a bit offhand, but it is definitely on point, given that Combe’s art is an offspring of the Postmodern era. So what happens when an artist is part of a generation heavily influenced by Postmodernism, but working as a visual artist in an age shaped by the Internet? Combe’s relationship with Postmodernism does not rely on some retrospective fascination – it is inherited from his own experience, having spent his formative years surrounded by the echo of the era.

--Natalija (Natalie) Paunić

We go through our lives...bombarded [by]... internal and external forces. Often, our personal stimuli—memories, inspiration, longing, lust—seem to come from somewhere outside ourselves, outside our control," writes San Anselmo painter Jeffrey Palladini. This postmodern concept of human limitations is useful, but only to a point: Sir Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation series stated that artists need a base level of confidence in society. Palladini has found a way out of the despair born of helplessness. Quoting Faulkner's "the past is not even past," Palladini hypothesizes time to be as fluid a medium as the watery beings it supports: "Perhaps moments are not linear and sequential, but looping, repeating, simultaneous." He considers time as relative, and "time's steady march" as possibly just another sociocultural myth.

In paintings and one sculpture, Palladini questions human perception as well as the conventions of traditional (immobile) art. He depicts the silent protagonists of his paintings in the bold outlines and flat colors of pop art, but with their faces averted from the viewer, and subjected to "fragmentation, mulitple views, sequential images, and off-sets" (his words). Shift #2 shows a young man's head from a three-quarter rear view, his face hidden, with the image seemingly painted on out-of-register slats or strips that one visually tries to "correct." Doppler, its name reflecting the subjectivity of perception, compromises 24 square paintings of a man's profile with the face cropped out, as if badly photographed; it is seen in sequence small, larger, and then again small, as if the camera zoomed in and out, looking for focus. An Alternate #2 juxtaposes two identical views of a figure looking down, with the standing figure seeming to scrutinize the horizontal one below. Chaise #24 and A Gradual Descent feature sleeping women, one in bed, the other napping at poolside or beach, both with faces averted. The sculpture, Seven Pieces, is a pyramid of painted wooden sticks; stand in the right position, and the abstract images align and coalesce into another of the artist's elusive protagonists. As Palladini explains: "Our identity is made up entirely of bits of past, present, and future, and is never static.

--DeWitt Cheng