The project is currently ongoing.
︎ Artist Statement
“Joyce
is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from
which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped
in them.”
-
James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village (1953)
When one writes about painting, it is common to locate the work within a ‘tradition.’ For contemporary art, this usually amounts to finding a place for the piece to lie in a collage of historical and contemporary references. The artist may reference other artists that they pull directly from, may make work that berates their predecessors, or work that expands on ‘outsider’ traditions. When speaking casually, one might find themselves saying, “his work talks about abstract expressionism,” or “this painting is a criticism of Julien Schnabel [sic].” Of course, we all realize that a painting does not speak. It says nothing. In real terms, its silence is one of its immutable qualities. A painting only seems to speak, to comment, insofar that paintings project themselves outwards or inwards. A painting can unfold, elaborate on itself, appropriate, and regurgitate. A painting can also infold, become self-reflexive, self-referential and obscured. It reaches out and pulls inward.
Regardless of the history of painting as a tradition, paintings themselves exist. Regardless of the history of painting, I still make paintings. It would be self-effacing to suggest that I am making work to ‘comment’ on anything. If I wanted to ‘comment’ on something, there are more direct ways than painting. If I wanted to assert a political agenda, I would not make art. This is not to say I believe paintings are apolitical, that they have no power over us, and are relegated purely to the aesthetic – this is a simple statement of intention. I make paintings, I go down, inside of myself, in a naïve attempt to pull something out of history. I go down into myself with a violent love for lost time. This is the truth – I have done this all for love.
There is some relationship, in my practice, to vertigo. Somatically, vertigo is related to film. If one has not experienced vertigo or is a person who experiences vertigo differently than I do; the sensation seems like a repetitive movement of the eye side to side, like one is constantly, compulsively reading. This occurs most often standing or walking. Each thing caught by the eye is a frame running across a projector. Film stills, like all photos, reference a particular moment in time; and like all other photos, break open and bleed out into their surroundings. They are important to suggest a past and a future that one does not get to see. Perhaps, one was not even meant to see this moment. The second function of vertigo, related to the first, is its changing of time. Vertigo spins the head. As vertigo ‘spins’ the world, perhaps mine flows backwards, east to west, reversing the days, sunset to sunrise, delivering me back to the past I so desperately want.
These are the sensations, both somatic and affectual, from which my work emerges. I chase these feelings because to me they turn the political personal. They rescue history. That is my intention. Despite the impossibility of this mission, despite the violence, despite the widening years, I reach out.
per esempio:
My love, in history, like time,
like painting. Like water,
flows and is silent.
In order to survive, we all must love silent lovers. We all must love something ‘despite the facts.’ We believe in things despite the violence of the world. Those are the precise locations of convictions, hopes and humanity. We must paint despite paintings’ history. We must disregard the facts and strive in despite of everything, and not because of it. With a thin wash of watercolor, I paint another vase. I capture a glimpse of the past with a monotype – the violence of the eruption of Vesuvius. This was a moment that haunted the Romans, who may have captured it on film if they could. It was their atomic bomb. I want their bomb and our bombs to touch.
Perhaps I have gotten away from myself, and it is better to explain things more plainly. I thought it would be necessary, before pinning down ‘content’ and ‘form,’ to make a quick sketch of the oceanic feeling that my work exists in. I have chosen to write, in loose prose and sometimes with poetry, a book. The book recounts the life of Antinous, a young man who lived in the first century AD. Precise biographic information is difficult to find. What is known is that he was the lover of Emperor Hadrian and he died suddenly in the Nile. Afterwards, a grief-stricken Emperor deified him. His image became the most reproduced in the Roman world, overtaken only by Christ. There are many interesting things about this story. It is a traveling story, where a man leaves home to never return. In contemporary terms, he emigrates. It is also an erotic story, and a story about an unhappy love. I have produced paintings in relation to the story, not as a direct illustration, but as pieces besides the text. They are small, to emphasize their distance in time. They are small, too, because small paintings are melancholic. They are not for galleries. They are for lonely artists who cry and shake.
Horses, like people, want to be free.