Rembrandt's Lion Drawing

The function of art is to reveal something new, to open a mind’s doors and windows, to show something more is possible. As painting in particular realized itself and satisfied all its formal and aesthetic aspirations by 1915 it is not possible anymore to make more art unless it reaches well beyond those accomplishments. The visual language is only a tool to assist and lead a mind to wonder about something that matters. The conceptual, literal and philosophical direction is the key aim at a possibility of a profound realization and poetic magic. This series of works were done for a show in Warsaw. I do have a contentious history and conflicted relationship with this city. I prize it and appall it. It is familiar and foreign. I was born here and grew up elsewhere. People I loved where hurt here and yet resisted to leave. It is marginal and it matters. We live in the world comprised of and described by the opposites. The good and bad, the light and dark, the right and wrong, the pure and corrupt are all a part of one, two-sided coin that is the currency of truth. All those polarities, however divergent, are necessary elements of defining a complete whole, an accurate account of the nature of existence. In a visual language this juxtaposition of elements extends itself to the preposition that any image driven artwork comprises of top and bottom, “sky” and “ground”. As described to me by my first mentor, Aleksander Kobzdej, this applies not only to an image of a landscape but, equally, to all other visual representations including still life, portraiture, abstraction, etc. At the point of where those two planes meet, the “horizon”, there is a line of tension that contains something essential and significant. The works in this series deal with this idea on a literal, conceptual and formal level. The use of the images ranges from appropriated and classical—Rembrandt’s lion, Leonardo’s St. Sebastian—to representational, incidental, imagined. They’re pointedly personal, political, socio-cultural. The images are combined with words, written juxtaposing terms. The drawings are quick and urgent. They are bold and imposing in scale and the execution of the imagery basic and fragile in their medium—oil-charcoal and ink on paper. They’re meant to be easily perishable. They all carry a unifying element of a red line dividing each into “sky” and “ground”. The red line, or the red band, is contained by thin pencil lines and filled with red ink. (Related to a memory of my first job given to me by my architects parents when I might have been 7-8 years old, to fill in red ink on certain streets on large urban plan blue prints. They actually paid me to do it and I loved it.) In the red band are hand-written, penciled (juxtaposing) words. The bold, aggressive, large scale visuals, appearing imposingly from afar and subtle, delicate elements that include language, visible only at closeup range provides two differing ways of perceiving and interacting with the works. The words are the words. And as Ludwig Wittgenstein aptly concluded, “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

Drawing:Charcoal on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:108 W x 66 H x 0.1 D in

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