I can't believe it's Magic Painting

Born in Guyana, South America and raised in Boston, MA, my paintings function as both a dislocation and relocation of self in relationship to Postcolonial concepts of the black male body. This body is in constant flux between representation and abstraction; it is space where a masculine "other" resides.Flow. Rhythm. Space. Marlon Forresters paintings possess these qualities. Their combined effect provides the perfect backdrop for the ambulatory bodies that populate his paintings. Bodies that remain unfixed even as they are pieced together from scraps of paper, bits of drawings and magazine and newspaper cutouts because the pieces are not affixed in a seamless way; their construction appears almost haphazard. Yet, these are warriors bearing the implements and wounds of conflict. Bodies. Black bodies, male bodies, broken bodies, serve as the pillars atop which Forrester initiates a discourse on heroicism. He contends that the black male body has been crafted into a warring body under constant assault by history, by the market, and in the art world. He highlights the paradoxical trope of a broken hero in order to make visible this multivalent assault. Concerned with the corporate use of the black body, or the body as logo, Forresters paintings reflect meditations on the exploitation implicit in the simultaneous apotheosis and fear of the muscular black figure in America. For him, phrases like fast as a leopard, used to describe contemporary heroes (sports stars), reassert animalistic monikers that served to describe African warriors as wild or indigenous. Emptied by historical manipulations and refilled by contemporary needs, in effect, the Black Hero is always a paradox bound to definitions not meant to include him. Born in Guyana, South America, Forrester and his family migrated to the United States when he was three years old. He spent his formative years in Dorchester, MA. As a student, Forrester was both an athlete and an artist. Thus, it isnt only the black male body as symbol that interests Forrester, but his own body and the impositions both history and the present make upon it.arent in Forresters lyrical freestyle performances. A deeper investigation of Forresters formal considerations reveals an essential crux that allows his paintings to cohere. . This corresponds to a deep interest in music as a way of translating emotional states into visual forms.Forrester thinks of pattern as a time-based medium.