Statement
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These paintings bring together seemingly incongruous types of painting - representational and abstract. As the viewer's eye crosses a border from realism to abstraction, the visual rules change. Then there's a shock to the system when abstract and realist images are smashed together, a jolt like sudden eyesight. Imagine Vermeer meets Pollock.
While the work is pluralistic in the use of different painting styles, the obsessive finessing of the realist areas and rigorous composition allows the viewer to apply connoisseurship that is normally reserved for classical realism or high Modernism.
Abstraction and realism share a common ability to evoke space and texture. These paintings are composed so that visual densities - textural knots - move and shift across the surface, thus establishing resonance and correspondences between the abstract and realistic areas.
The juxtaposition of the stylistic elements plays out in a straightforward (non-appropriated) manner. Just as there is an indifference to the abstraction / representation “debate”, the work displays a tacit dedication to the act of painting. As poured paint can be considered a performance document, so the realist painting is a performance, albeit slower, with shamanistic or devotional overtones.
The paintings contain a dialog between the representational and the abstract regions; this dialog may take the form of resonant color, textual correspondences, or compositional devices used to move the eye all over the visual plane. Use of sculptural elements such as shaped canvases, diptychs and found objects are devices to further the flow of attention across the entire work. The use of construction and sculptural elements also add another layer in the dialog about “object-ness” versus illusionism.
The work is unapologetically hot, content rich. A high tension gets built up between poured paint and the methodic representation, as if the work reveals a double life - by turns conventional, then illicit.
Some history: My representational work started in the late 70’s leaving aside minimalism. In the 80’s, I chose to concentrate on landscapes as an emotionally neutral subject. The process/action painting goes back to an early infatuation with Morris Louis and, of course, Jackson Pollock.