Using the motif of a liquid or goopy mass as a formal and thematic basis, my current painting is an exploration of the border between abstraction and figuration.
The mass itself is a form that is psychologically loaded, often highly abject, but I present it in the context of painterly abstraction. The all over fields of Abstract Expressionism and Color field painting, as well as its frequent Pop and Post-modern resampling of those traditions as a symbol of itself, are intertwined with the cultural and psychological associations of the subject the mass invokes. The figurative and linguistics forms within, above, and around the mass add further narrative and semantic elements in relation to the content.
Art, and painting in particular, flirts with visual desire, the need to fantasize, to confront or to create. In order to emphasize this point, I introduced a pictorial world in my paintings where there is only one character named Steve. As an object of desire, a stand-in for the artist, and a vehicle to explore the formal and narrative possibilities within painting, Steve as a device allowed me to upset the tradition of the female nude by upturning the gender of the muse, comment on desire and also depict technology to imbricate these works in a contemporary climate.
Between 2017-2019, I focused my exploration of Steve’s environment onto the setting of a beach. This narrative limitation allowed me to dive deeper into my content while adding more layers of formal abstraction into the work.