inside

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on January 27, 2013 at 5:41pm

Curator’s Comment:

 

These icon based pieces are striking in their presentation of contemporary abstraction within archaic forms and context.  I especially like this painting entitled Inside, for its bleached out portrait erases the expectantly soulful eyes.  Color and light seem to move almost randomly across the image, burning out or eroding small sections while applying luminous glaze over other areas. The exaggerated vertical elongation of the picture plane and erratic value patterns are also enigmatic and perplexing. The golden yellow hue can normally be associated with religious iconography, but paired here with the red-violet shade, it offers a decidedly more conflicted image. The second icon work in the series, Going Inside, further separates the traditional image from exploration with gestural mark making and subjective color.  The sharp division between the two layers calls to mind historically dogmatic approaches to photographic imagery versus spiritual pictorialism.  In my understanding of the split, the goal of the later was to move beyond mere representation to a deeper or more mystical understanding of the subject.