Big Smitty...

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on January 6, 2014 at 5:47pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

The ecstatic rainbow palette in many of your works appears to border on pastiche, particularly the paintings that include the stylized female icons. The Girl with the Golden Leg, as an example, is both disturbing and visually enticing.  The anonymity of her form and sexualized fetish gear seem oddly detailed against her explosively abstracted surrounds. Her central placement in the pictorial space demands her identity as a focal point, but doesn’t offer much more in terms of a personal narrative, or embodiment of Eros.  In fact, there seems to be an inherent preference for costume or couture, with access to her crisply patterned stocking but not her face.  Big Smitty pushes the figure-ground relationship into pure non-objectivity, though arguably the circular forms maintain a figurative essence in the context of the portfolio. I like the energy in this piece and the fluctuation between controlled static shapes and the randomized dollops of thick paint and wavy lines. The strong diagonal movement cutting across the square format is nicely offset by the radiating circles; they break any stabilizing symmetry that would otherwise occur. And it’s in this piece that the various approaches in other works materializes, and ultimately finds the tenuous balance between order and chaos.