Sanguis Terrae II Painting

ARTIST STATEMENT 2023 My new series is largely about visual relationships, but you will find that I have continued to combine and rework some familiar symbolic themes and motifs. In these works, a single hard-edged red vertical bar is superimposed on heavily textured paint and fluid strokes. It can be experienced as an act of aggression, one of anxiety or emotional ambivalence – an attempt to measure, to mark, to connect points or to dissever planes. In much of my earlier work, verticals (often in the form of arches) could be found floating in abstract-expressionist scapes. The vertical is now reduced to a single entity: both column and window, a positive and negative space; continuously anchoring and unanchoring itself to the field of significance it overlies. In the metaphorical space these works inhabit, interrelated and contrary forces form symbolic connections: order and chaos, nature and technology, logic and spirituality – categories allegorically cleaved and visually seamed. I often see the red representing a new consciousness or a life force and thus the titles “Sanguis Maris/Caeli/Terrae/Mentis” (Blood of the Sea/Sky/Earth/Mind). Most profoundly for me, these paintings mark a new and personal chapter of transformation and growth as a human in this world. Richard Wlodarczak May 20, 2023