Night | Desert | Garden
Night, Desert, Garden - each of these represent broad geographic categories. Defined by myriad associations in nature, myth, history and ritual, they are equally rooted in poetry, cinema, and narrative. They are landscapes of possibility and represent places of refuge, exile, or distances to be crossed out of necessity or desire. They are places of beauty and hostility, zones of accessibility and fragility. These paintings were made in a wide context between Jerusalem and Rome, cities celebrated and burdened by their own identities. They include passages that speak peace against the abuse of power, and scenes of impossible areas of trespass. In using loaded place-names and figures, such as Europa, Golan, Caesar and Leper as a way to invite existing associations for the viewer while drawing upon specific concepts, the work resides in a tension of familiarity.
The charged spaces between experience and memory inform the images I make. These spaces have allowed the work to co-exist within territories inscribed through conflict and marked by intersecting histories. This work permits a highly personal and imaginative interpretation alongside directly observed content in order to adapt overlapping iconographies.
The work is conceptualized to be in dialogue with the places we live and how we share our relationship to it. And, as urgency appears inseparable from the conditions of everyday life, what potential exists for still, inanimate objects? Burdened by the excessive image-driven spectacle of our media, artwork offers rest, alternative action or lament. It may serve to be, as Wallace Stevens said about poetry, “imagination pressing against the pressure of reality”. Since objectivity and subjectivity are always linked in the forms of representation, these works offer presence in the pressure and hopefully invite genuine encounters to reality.
In the diverse language of making, painting acknowledges the physical and the haptic as a woven structure of material and image. It offers distinct boundaries of perception which negotiate distances from events or places with singularity. If the work succeeds in drawing alongside these emphases, it may aid in framing a vision that is empathetic and compassionate, one which prioritizes solidarity in a moment of increasing division.
Orvieto, 2019