Artist Statement // Grosse Fuge (2023)

  
Oil, wax, ink, powder and skin – my paintings are made of these as I stich and press pigments together into some facsimile of sensation. Through them, I contend with the interplay between detachment and power through the displacement of bodily forms.

  
On 23 May 1618, a group of Bohemian Protestants led by Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn-Valsassina threw two Catholic governors and their secretary out of a top-floor window of Prague Castle, becoming the unlikely flash point that set off the Thirty Years’ War. Of course, we sit in a different point in history today with rather different circumstances, and history should be taken for a cautionary tale more than prophesy. Yet the rhythms of turmoil and conflict remain familiar and resonate in us still – so it does in Ruben’s _Consequences of War_, as it does in Beethoven’s _Grosse Fuge_. 

  
My disquiet arises thusly in my paintings of disembodied limbs that I whip into a frenzy of vibrant colors and abstracted movements. Their great grasping hands are extensions of my subjective sensations of grip, hold, compression and connectivity. But, the language of their grip is universal in that we understand what it is to grasp, push, and to bear. Their forms coagulate into recognizable shapes in places and fall apart in others, suggesting their ambiguous detachment from a greater whole. A deeper read reveals the presence of other bodily bits – the brain, a vagina, a sphenoid bone – that are themselves wells of physiological mysteries and primordial myth.

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Cogito Ergo Sum