In my series of paintings, Abstract Placements, I denote two signifiers: “landscape” and “expressionist mark”. It is what is connoted by each of these objects that mutates in my paintings. By layering the two signifiers I draw tension between tropes, diminishes the purity of each signifier, and repositions the viewer’s understanding of each symbol. These two quotes from art history, representing Romanticism and Expressionism respectively, are like layered sound clips with traces of meaning, but whose historical narrative has been supplanted by their relativity. I am attempting to call into question their symbol-ness while at the same time introducing their dynamic as a subject.
The mark is divorced from being an emissary of process, or an embodiment of painterly vernacular by resting on and interacting with an illusionistic surface. The marks laying on the surface play between figuration and abstraction, and their function is to both separate and join the plane of the picture with the illusion behind it. By juxtaposing the two different signs, I undermine both the expressive and the pictorial so that the “expressionist mark” sinks just below the radar of language and the background rises above the genre of landscape.
The landscape signifier references the idealized landscape, as depicted by J.M.W. Turner and John Singleton Copley. The layering places the background beyond depictions of nature, intimations of the sublime, or constructions of the surreal. If the mark on the surface were not impasto, some of the paintings would resemble the illusionistic Surrealism of Yves Tanguy, where dreams are depicted as a landscape. But in my paintings the marks take on the role of characters that occupy a landscape that is the dream. These landscapes are a fiction, painted from my imagination in a spirit closer to the American than European Romantic tradition. By rendering an imperfect, ugly figure projecting from and disturbing an otherwise peaceful and idealized landscape, I’m touching on the example of environmental degradation and hubris that originated with a philosophy where Manifest Destiny trumps Nature as a manifestation of the divine. While the place depicted neither terra firma nor terra incognita, these works are, in their inception, like the subjects represented in the sampled, idealized imagery of the Hudson River School. They are about discovery, exploration, and settlement. They are about the history of painting, and their content is inspired by a conceptual discourse. I seek to maintain a tension between pre-modern rendering, the modern acknowledgment of a painting’s surface, and post-modern appropriation.