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Chromatic Thermodynamics
If we take the year 2008 to be occurring sometime after the modernity of Matisse and somewhere before the designification of everything, then I situate my painting within little interstices of time, trends, technologies, and other mediated phenomena that take place within a pluralistic notion of identity.
I come from a family of painters that includes Mark Rothko, the artists of Lascaux, my mother, Virginia Magalios; the aforementioned Matisse, Jan Van Eyck, the Aboriginal painters of Australia, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent Van Gogh, Henry Aaron, Robert Ryman, vernacular African architectural painting, Luc Tuymans, Rembrandt, Jimmy Page, and anyone who affirms the materialization of color as a soothing and revelatory phenomenon.
My notion of painting begins with the idea that an artist may be at once an a-historical and poly-historical figure if he/she studies and collects the past (i.e. movements, trends, figures, etc.) into critical materials for constructing a kind of personal architecture in which one may use both additive and subtractive techniques for dwelling. For, after all, in this our nameless historical period, a multiplicity of discourses, may perhaps be the one dominant paradigm. This pluralistic notion, in my view, should enhance, embrace, and encompass a variety of technical, psychological, and conceptual considerations. My work begins with the notion of time and history as inclusive of difference and differing.
My notion of color begins with a conception of vernacular palettes and is complemented by my studies and deep appreciation for the warmth and natural colors of the caves of Lascaux, Altamira, and other examples of chromatic thermodynamics. My time spent inhabiting and visualizing vernacular chromatic tendencies has lead to my concept of the ground palette, a form and framework from which my chromatic investigations depart. The ground palette is both a visual and a philosophical innovation |
culled together from the genius of those who integrate color as a from of spiritual shelter. The ground palette is above all a thermodynamic architecture from which all visual building materials emerge in my work.
This thermal dynamic relationship
in my work attempts to manipulate color beyond the visual
and conceptual boundaries of what it means to experience
warmth. For color is, after all, visible light (i.e.
energy, radiation). In my work, reds, oranges, yellows,
and their numerous admixtures become practically palpable
and radiant materials. I paint in a multitude of intuitive
and counter-intuitive techniques that are inspired by
my studies of the strife between world and earth and
that are blended into new combinations that become my
own private movements within my selves. They include
abstract impressionism, chromatic thermodynamics, fati
povera, and speleological illumination, to name a few.
My techniques aim for a visceral and intuitive surface structure grounded in the tension of the contact between paint and support, or in the case of my drawing, between pen, pencil, or marker and glass, wall or paper. I integrate a wide variety of application methods, dilution ratios of paint, and brush types to arrive at a complex yet integral relationship between idea, technique, and aesthetic experience. In this way I do not have an “identity” or “style”.I have a multiplicity of them that find their articulation in a geothermal and erotic relationship to color.
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