BAD PAINTING is a series of conceptual paintings that I would like to categorize as Bad Realism which is work that is bad in terms of style, craftsmanship & content. The badly executed paintings represent the underlying bad realism of the actions depicted.
Bad paintings that represent various real-life atrocities committed by humans.The work challenges the Western sense of beauty, perfectionism and fear of failure. I personally find the making of this work very liberating as I am not restricted in terms of how I paint as I am not bound to any rules of painting. Rooms are distorted, bodies are out of proportion, shadows fall into the wrong direction, compository elements are disregarded etc.

Jay Rechsteiner’s Bad Paintings (2013) brings the horrors of human culpability front and center. We don’t have to look too far to see the atrocities within our communities. Turn on the news, take an extended walk through familiar streets. Sadness and pain are everywhere. Rechsteiner states that his “main interest [is] in the underlying structure of things [and how] his artworks directly respond to the surrounding environment and . . . everyday experiences.” We so often look for beauty in everything. Why not accept the ugliness of misery? Confront it and learn how to deal with it? Rechsteiner wrestles with these ideas in his studio and asks the same of his veiwer. He wishes to “demonstrate how life extends beyond [our] own subjective limits,” to tell “a story about the effects of global cultural interaction,” and “the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.”
John Ros, GalleryEll