The fact that all things, including humans, appear to be essentially disconnected from their material substance, is one of the defining characteristics of our contemporary digital age. This ghostly set of circumstances is the outcome of ongoing, mostly invisible, forces of abstraction constantly in action that we can retrace in the ever-present digitalization of more and more aspects of experience. Consequently, as living beings, we are now confronted with a structural divide between the substance of things and their virtual double. The digital realm has now expanded and infiltrated all of our social spaces, leaving us in a situation where there no longer seems to be an inside or an outside. This has led to an increasingly inevitable deeper analysis and frequent reconsideration of the relationship between humans, space, and technology and their manifestations.

A new and ever-changing world can seem awkward because the interpretation schemes that we have painstakingly developed in the old world are no longer suitable for interpreting the changed reality, and if it is true that we can no longer count on our reassuring routines stabilized during the span of a lifetime, it is even more real the impossibility of functionally interfacing with a new world without the availability of new ideas on which to found it – and the lack of images to represent it. How to represent the presence of absence then? In a time and space that seems to demand the neutrality and erasure of the world and wants everything to fall back into the indifferent screen in which nothing is affirmed and only tends to the intimacy of what subsists in the void; a vacuum that suggests the menacing proximity of an “outside” as the background on which reality continues to affirm things in their disappearances.

Ours is indeed the age of abstraction; it’s the reality of not being in the real. The existence of contemporary man is desensualized and now lost in a prevailing paradigm of selfhood, competition and radical individualism that through digitalization has created a social order in which the self is experienced as private and separate from – the self and – the others, and in which even social essential communal dimension has been negated.  

Pieter Schoolwerth’s research reflects the destabilized process of identity construction in an age characterized by increasingly abstract social relations, he investigates and experiments with the effects of generalized abstraction on representations of the human form and the space that bodies occupy. Through a rigorous analytical system, Schoolwerth manipulates language, form and space to create his own set of altered “realities” that exist in the space between thing and thoughts, and not necessary only between virtual and real – what Pieter Schoolwerth enacts is, in fact, not a critique of digitalization but rather an ontological investigation into being-in-the-world and all its implications. Schoolwerth’s works are complex compositions that combine pictorial, sculptural, drawn, printed, painted, and computer-generated elements. The concept behind his research is premised on the idea that our physical bodies are gradually dissolving, becoming lost in the digital vortex that generates an abyss of isolation rather than authentically connecting and uniting people with the world. 

As our bodies dissolve, a two-dimensional copy of our presence is all that is left behind as a trace of our existence. Pieter’s works, on the other hand, do not merely intend to expose the fallacy of a made-up digital world; rather, the artist investigate the space that exists in between the two worlds and attempt to evoke how inseparable the digital and real selves have become, while documenting the body’s resistance to evaporation. The body, which has always been the territory of social control and regulation, intersections and exchanges, now takes on an even more radical centrality. Traversed by processes of identity redefinition and overthrow, the evolving body is a fantastic hybridization of the organic and inorganic, of biological matter and microprocessors, in a contamination of flesh and technology that simultaneously empowers and dissolves human beings.    

Language itself (the most dominant and universal rule system governing thought and behavior) is de-structured nowadays. In the age of computer-based communication – which relies primarily on written words and codes – the body can disappear, along with the gestures that reveal the variations of the communicated thoughts. This distance creates an environment in which a priori there is no need for the physical presence of the interlocutors —basically promoting a mode of communication based on an underlying incommunicability. Therefore, there are no more meanings but only signifiers , which pierce and subjugate us, making us succubi of something we cannot control, even though we delude ourselves that we can. 

The virtual cites life, the virtual cites the body; it thus inevitably refers to something else – as the body physically disappears and does not exist except as something other than itself. This material and ideal transfiguration thus occurs from a splitting –  an internal split allowing for a kind of de-personalization and the creation of a new (non)-being outside of the self (or its illusion). We live in a time that invites one to lay down the social and civic will and consciousness of things and offers as an alternative the inviting possibility of “not-being” and thus not-being subject to any kind of abuse, not-being the object of anyone’s occupation, not-being the victim of criticism, and so on omitting. Thus, the “present-absent mask” frees us from the burdensome discomfort of being, in a magic of fading that becomes habit – but, it is an increasingly immaterial and inorganic condition of a mimesis traced of life.

The inorganic body thus prefigures itself as a simulation of the self. A double/shadow, the vision of a representation and the cultural presentation of this vision. In Schoolwerth’s work, the invisibility, the layering, the removal from the image reflects our distance from the contemporary world; with his original research (from language to figuration), the artist experiments with new forms of documentation and representation of the disappearing “body”. An example can be traced in the internal and fragile dynamics of splitting and removal in the lives of Schoolwerth’s characters, who are there as a hinted form of representation that tends toward the invisible. Pieter Schoolwerth’s elaborate creative process combines different techniques and mediums and moves between digital and gesture in a mode of representation that literally photographs a changing world, in its visible and invisible implications – bodies, space, and time – as an analogy for the simultaneity and frenetic movement of the digital age.