Andrew J Park’s paintings prompt personal reflection through VCR distorted nostalgia

Google, YouTube, Reddit, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, AI – these are the corners of the internet where painter Andrew J Park sources inspiration for his fractured, hazy windows into the past. “I’ve long been fascinated by the fallibility of memory,” Andrew says. “How it can be deeply unreliable, yet remain a powerful force in shaping one’s perception and decision making.” After finding images online or generating bizarre scenes through artificial intelligence, he feeds them through VHS/TV combo setups or emulation software, effectively blitzing them into shards of analog nostalgia. “The paintings are then executed entirely freehand without the use of stencils or vinyl, relying on the occasional painters tape.”

Andrew focuses on Hito Steyerl’s concept of “the poor image”, digitally compressed and widely shared content that exists at the bottom of a hierarchy of media fidelity that is throned by the ultra-HD. As a 90s baby, Andrew shares flickering childhood memories of Power Rangers and retro videogames as a way of democratising culture – prioritising accessibility over technical perfection.

“Always sitting in the back of my mind are the psychologically charged portrait and figuration works of Lucian Freud, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans,” he shares, bridging the gap between the old masters and the technological new, refocusing it with the timeless tactility of painting. “There’s a tension there in the confluence of the synthetic and the sentimental, between something algorithmic and immaterial like AI, and something real yet intangible like memory and nostalgia.”