“Dilemma” (2001)

The studio had become a site of controlled collapse. I work with the figure as it arrives in memory and crisis: partial, overlapping, already becoming something else. The yellow is residual heat—the after-image of looking too long at people who will not stay still. Under pressure the body leaks its silhouette; these forms are residue of unfinished gestures, not characters. Influences appear as linkage, never quotation: Giacometti’s walkers allowed to swarm, Matisse’s color inside the form, Gorky and late de Kooning bodies that refuse to be only bodies. The figures do not stand against the yellow; they are the yellow thinking about itself. Transformation, as in Ovid and Dante, is rarely clean. The work lives at the threshold just before a figure solidifies or dissolves. Color is the temperature at which identity melts. I do not know if they rise or fall. The painting only asks that we stay long enough to feel the bright preciousness of their unfinished lives.