John Walter is a painter. He is the subject and sometimes the form of his own work. He collates his findings into paintings, which act as the platform for his maximal and arresting performative installations. He also makes over-sized artist’s books that are a form of self-portrait in which the protagonist is concealed and then revealed in perpetuity.

He draws references from both high and low culture filtering them and synthesizing them into his very consistent aesthetic. Through his painting and object making he forces the characters of his subconscious to play together; design great Ettore Sottsass may find himself engaged in a dialogue with Mr. Peanut and the artist’s mother. He transposes the structure of his imagination into the real world using elements that everyone can understand.

He is a virtuosic draftsman but rejects classical technique, subverting it through the use of projectors and distorting surfaces. He is a serial collaborator, working with artists whom he often has diametrically opposed practices and processes. This exchange allows him to clarify his own position and simultaneously clarify the position of the other. He is the über appropriationist but also a maestro of artists. The syntax of his paintings acts as the research for his skill in nurturing connections between artists.

Walter’s work is a channeling of social anthropology and psychoanalysis, investigating in either direction the macrocosm of the world outside and the microcosm of his internal world. His work is a dissection of the self, revealing both narcissist and Everyman. His dialectical investigation into his place in the world invites his audience into his constantly revised hermetic lexicon. Like tarot cards he seeks to find common ground with others through a shared reference. His work is a research into language and the dissemination of cants. He is a gregarious loner.

You are invited aboard Space Station Zsa Zsa for a mind-rinsing flight across the Atlantic over the sea of collage, absurdism and lurid colour that could only be Walter’s vision.