The new paintings are colorful, non-realist representational pictures of candles at various stages of burning out, and in varied scenarios and moods. The pictures often present a single melting or melted candle on top of a table, the depth of which is rendered roughly but with purposeful perspective that often leads to a vanishing point. The vanishing points sometimes direct the eye out of an abstract interior toward a horizon with suggestions of a sunrise or sunset — or the vanishing point leads deeper into a cave-like vignetted abstraction — or it heads off the picture plane altogether.
The palette of these paintings is consistently broad and saturated, and the painterly, textured surfaces were created by the application of a mix of traditional oil paint and medium as well as flocking, glass beads, acrylic, and alcohol ink to stretched and primed cotton canvas.
The framework of the paintings, formally, is traceable — cartoon, figuration, expressionism, abstract expressionism, impressionism, romantic painting, religious painting… contemporary art. And the imagery is candles. Candles on tables, candles in rooms and outside — burning, dripping, gone out — dripped their last or still lighting a room, the wall of a cave, a wine cellar, flickering, going out, going to go out, can’t burn forever.
These are hot, emotional artworks. Cool, cerebral mitigations of their dark, turbulent vitality include 1) the time that has passed since they were conceived, created, materials put together, 2) a taped off edge preventing some paint from getting over the side of each picture, and 3) the installation of the pieces inside the gallery space, now. In other words, they are immediate.
In the universe though, as in our experience of reality, time is not fixed or constant — and these paintings also have the vibration of bending back on themselves over a period of the artist’s personal experience. These were created in New York, in the East Village, but they carry the memory of experience elsewhere — Bed Stuy, East New York, Rockaway, Upstate; Athens, Paros, Hydra, Crete; San Francisco and Los Angeles; Chennai, Andaman Nicobar, Kerala; Boulder, Colorado; a boarding school called St. Bede's, a movie theater in Taos, Happy’s Stork Lounge in Miami
-Words by Thomas McDonnell