Lost and Found – How Our Postcard Paintings Are Defying the Irreversible Immediacy of the Digital World
Lost and Found – How Our Postcard Paintings Are Defying the Irreversible Immediacy of the Digital World
Postcards and Paint: Reviving Human Connection
We explore the inspiration behind our Lost and Found painting collection, sparked by David Wojnarowicz's Dear Jean-Pierre, a series of intimate postcards sent to his lover between 1979 and 1982. Reflecting on the physicality of these postcards, we highlight the importance of tangible objects as conduits for human connection in an increasingly digital world. Drawing from Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, we reflect on how our postcard-sized paintings will resist today’s fleeting, immaterial culture, reaffirming the magic of handmade art. Included are two examples of our first postcard paintings.
As we mark the first week of our Lost and Found painting collection, we return to the heart of the book that sparked our inspiration—Dear Jean-Pierre by David Wojnarowicz, a compilation of postcards letters sent across the ocean to his Parisian lover, Jean Pierre Delage, between 1979 and 1982.
Flipping through the pages, tracing the artsy postcards and letters, face and reverse, we are reminded of something both simple and profound: the undeniable power of the physical object to hold within it the weight of human connection, something tangible in a world that often feels anything but.
These tiny, unassuming 4x6 works of art moved at some point through the anonymous machinery of the world's mail system, surrounded by countless other pieces of paper, yet they are as intentional, as carefully crafted, as any brushstroke on canvas.
This fragile, perilous, tactile bond inspired us to recreate a similar experience—to return to the weight of touch and texture, shared with others, to the importance of the physical, in a time when everything feels increasingly distant, digital, immaterial, fleeting, and coldly engineered by algorithms.
Anna Kornbluh, in Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, explores how we're losing our connection to the physical art world, as the medium—the art object itself—is increasingly overshadowed by the pursuit of the experience, the quick dopamine hit.
As painters, we understand that painting is more than just the image; it's all the synchronicities of the artist's journey that created something unrepeatable, the random acts encapsulated in each piece, the weight of the brush, the choosing of the colors, and the gradual transformation of pigment into an expression that creates the potential for emotional connection with someone out there.
With Lost and Found, we aim to resist the shift toward the immaterial by creating intimate, postcard-sized paintings that we plan to mail out. By inscribing our calligraphy on the reverse when our paintings are complete at the end of the month, we aim to reclaim the importance of the medium—each piece becoming a vessel for emotion, a tangible reminder that even in a world chasing immediacy, there is enduring magic in true human creation and connection.
