Posted on March 27th, 2012
Painting is a form of power. At its height, painting becomes a conviction of monolithic proportion. When painting falls, it is proclaimed dead, thus slipping out of public consciousness before cultural memory is jarred once again. This ambiguous sense of direction is fruitful and pathetic. Never a medium of absolutes, to mash around its mud is akin to walking in a land where subjects are familiar but unrecognizable. In this land, relative time seems more effective than a specific date of birth. Repetitive notches become cognitive patterns of cultural motifs, systems of language, geography and statistics while their points of origin multiply into oblivion. Oblivion is simply an open system of order, defined by stripping or prying apart the rigidity of a definition, of the singular mark. Opening up thus becomes a critical gesture, where human error is of greatest affect.
Paint is ultimately a medium of shifting positions, of redistribution and battle before accumulating into doubtful conclusion. In this very tendency, it resembles a landscape. Origins, movements, direction, false starts, moving back, treading forward, hauntings, mud, motifs, horizons, alignments and currents are all managements or transformations of position prevalent in this body of work. Its slow progressions are reactionary negotiations between rules of conduct or points of reference. A detail brush is used to generalize the stroke; paint overruns its edges like a minuscule trough but nothing like a minuscule trough. Imperfect marks slide together through the transitions of origin to the eventual collapse of a fixed subject or opinion.
Treading through matter with slippery wanderings, these paradoxical paintings quickly rise and fall from memory to finally rest within the no man’s land. To be nowhere, in limbo, is at once intimidating and incredibly alluring. The methodical task quietly runs against the painter as a master of independent brilliance.
The power of being critical only surfaces through slippery wanderings while treading through the no man’s land.