“Dilemma”

The painting was made in a period when the studio had become less a place of control and more a site of controlled collapse I had been working for months with the figure-not the classical, whole, upright figure of portrait tradition, but the figure as it actually arrives in memory and in crisis: partial, overlapping, already in act of becoming something else. The yellow ground is not a landscape in any conventional sense. It is the residual heat of attention, the after- image of looking too long at people who will not stay still. The cool blue-grey that rises from the bottom edge is the only concession to gravity, a soft refusal that the the figures both enter and resist. The work grew out of a simple, almost stubborn premise: what if the human body, when subjected to enough pressure - historical, emotional, or simply, the pressure of being looked at - begins to leak its own silhouette? The blacked , and multicolored forms are not invented characters . They are the residue of gestures. I have watched for years, a hand raise, and greeting that never quite complete, a Body turning away mid sentence, the strange elegance of people who are leaving or arriving or simply refusing to. Still carry the memories of portraiture- the upright stance, the suggestion of a hat. I drew freely from several linkage without ever intending to quote them. The elongated, almost weightless silhouettes carry an echo of Giacometti’s attenuated walker’s, but stripped it of their existential loneliness and allow to swarm. The way color sit inside the forms rather than modeling them owes something to Matisse’s cut outs, though here the scissors have been replaced by the more violent, less list, reversible actions of the brush there is a distance conversation with the biomorphic surrealism of ARSHIE GORKY and the late de Kooning women bodies that refuse to be only bodies. Philosophically the painting sits closer to Mzerieau- Ponty idea of the body as already intertwined with the world than to any pure existential isolation. These figures do not stand against the yellow: they are the yellow’s way of thing about itself. Literature enter sideways, I have been rereading passages from ovid’s Metamorphoses and certain sections of Dante, in which the Damn or not so much punished as continuously rearranged. The painting is not in a loose illustration of either Text, but it is shared their intuition that transformation is rarely clean. The red figure high on the right limbs, flung outward , is as much Icarus as it is a dancer who has simply forgotten the floor. The the darker central mass feels closer to a small, temporary City Of bodies that have not yet decided whether they are one organism or many. This particular work is representative of my crisis in the most straightforward way. I am interested in the moment just before a figure either solidifies into a recognizable person or dispense entirely into pure paint. Most of my recent paintings over that threshold. Colors never merely decorative, it is the temperature at which identity begins to melt. Composition is rarely hysterically. The eyes is invited to wander the way intentions wander in a crowd or in a dream. The yellow field is not a background. It is the medium in which these partial cells can still move, Steel almost become hold again. I do not know whether the figures are rising out of the blue or falling into it. I prefer not to decide. The painting only asked that we stay with them long enough to feel the strange, bright Precious of their unfinished lives.