In looking at my work as a whole, I see that I am concerned with chaos and order, with logic and randomness and with how these registers relate. In my previous work, these concerns meant appropriating and remixing images in circulation, often photographs, and translated them into a twisted and particular point of view.
I mixe different historical and cultural moments and registers, juxtaposing and superimposing them in new ways.
My work has been obsessively concerned with detail; I delve into the images – or fragments of images – that I reproduce. This scrutiny necessarily entails radically altering those images, as does the later combining that I effect. Hence, the logic (any logic!) that might be expected to guide such clinical analysis is lost…a sort of scientific mechanism gone awry!
While everything that I describe holds true, in my recent work, I find myself pulling away from the image.
Of course, this was not a conscious decision. If my earlier work largely hinged on combining and deforming found images, the most recent work leaves the discernable image behind and, in a way, applies the same obsessive attention to the very acts of seeing and painting. Crossroads is really the term here: this is not a radical break in that all my prior concerns are still operative, but it is a dramatic shift.
Significantly, the “image” in the painting that best demonstrates this new tendency is of a sort of knot. That makes sense, since a knot is a metaphor for the mind. But, also logically, this is not a “pure knot”: what is that rubber belt in the upper left portion of the canvas? This pulling away from the outside world by no means entails purity or order, but new terms for the poles that have concerned me for some time.
This is particularly true in my recent work where I find myself pulling away from the image, a sort on inward movement, as if I were closing my eyes to the world and opening them up to my mind, to seeing. The drive to paint is somehow fully unleashed here. If my earlier work largely hinged on combining and deforming found images, the most recent work leaves the discernable image behind and, in a way, applies the same obsessive attention to the very acts of seeing and painting.
Significantly, the “image” in the painting that best demonstrates this new tendency is of a sort of knot. That makes sense, since a knot is a metaphor for the mind. But, also logically, this is not a “pure knot”: what is that rubber belt in the upper left portion of the canvas? This pulling away from the outside world by no means entails purity or order, but new terms for the poles that have concerned me for some time.