Peter Zacskó

Born in Surahammar, Sweden. Studied at Örebro School of Art 1986-89 and at the College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm 1993-98.

I work with “Communication”, often by means of double meanings expressed in oil paintings.

Background:
I grew up with lip-reading. People expected me to understand them. I practiced speaking and did exercises in lip-reading large quantities of words. I used a mirror and practiced for hours at a time watching my speech teacher’s lips and comparing them with the movements of my own lips. I cannot hear my own voice at all. I always had to guess at what people were trying to say. It felt like a problem in mathematics which was difficult to solve.

For this reason I use paradoxes and misunderstandings to exemplify in my paintings occurrences in which deaf and hearing people fail to understand each other.

Paradoxes and misunderstandings also arise among hearing people in daily life and in society.

By using new ideas and concepts connected with this theme I paint playfully but challengingly.

Communication involves a certain risk precisely because it is easy for people to misunderstand each other. For example, when a few letters in a word are missing or replaced with other letters the meaning conveyed can be entirely different from the one intended. When someone hears “gök” instead of “kök” the result can be unexpected and comical. [Translator’s note: in Swedish gök and kök mean respectively “cuckoo” and “kitchen”.]

We often think that we’ve heard correctly when it turns out that this was not the case.
This complication does not apply exclusively to deaf and hearing people: it can be observed more generally when two considerably different cultures meet.

To a certain extent I aim to entertain the viewer with my painting, which contains double meanings. The technique used is oil on plexiglass.

The paintings are grouped in varying ways, for example two can be hung together in a corner, thus making a mirror effect in which one painting is reflected in the other.

By grouping together paintings of different sizes I try both to irritate and to create balance. But in fact the paintings constitute statements which are more or less simple to decipher.

I also collect small objects and use them to create installations which give rise to different meanings and misinterpretations, somewhat like those I illustrate in my paintings. Between these objects runs literally a red thread. [Translator’s note: in Swedish the expression “a red thread”, en röd tråd, means a “main thread”, a theme reappearing in several connected texts or phenomena. In this case a red thread in the concrete sense of the word is used to symbolize the connection between the objects.] For example, on a table laden with many objects awakening humorous associations a fir branch is linked to a faucet, thus suggesting a linguistic misunderstanding which is hard enough to solve. [Translator’s note: gran is Swedish for “fir tree”, kran for “faucet”. Such word-pairs, identical on the lips and in this case scarcely observable there, are a nightmare for the lip-reader.]

The installations are in the process of taking form.

My video films treat the same theme. For example I show by photo animation and signs the misinterpretation of “ape” as “ABBA”. [Translators note: Swedish for “ape” is apa, identical on the lips with the name of the Swedish popular music group ABBA.]