American Monsters III

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on August 18, 2017 at 3:40pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

There’s nothing equivocal about your feelings towards American Monsters as represented in politics and the war machines of greed and discontent.  The painting designated # 4 is particularly damning in its depiction of our most recent presidential candidates- their faces essentially replaced by a**** stuffed full of money.  The merging of urban cityscapes, graffiti and (misspelled) text may owe an aesthetic and conceptual debt to Basquiat, but this work appears fresh and current.  The inclusion of the ubiquitous red baseball cap’s appearance in piece # 3 is topical in the iconography of the right, but under and beside it, the identity of the monsters dissolve into slathering ghouls. I contemplate whether or not there’s dark humor in this work, such as Phillip Guston’s cartoons of the Klan, but the raw expression conjures brutal anger more than satirical fun.  The severity of the political trauma and failure of government to serve its people is also underscored in Drowning.  Now a dozen years out from Katrina, the outline of Louisiana still resonates against stripped down depictions of the flood.  I find the more subdued color and beautifully rendered figural elements attract the viewer enough to draw us into the space; where the success of the American Monsters is that the work forcefully pushes us out.  I applaud this work for its graphic strength, and personal voice addressing collective modern rage. There’s certainly enough to go around.