American Beauty Under Surveillance Print

"In a time when there is enough well-executed but wholly unfelt abstraction around to constitute a new salon, which indeed it has effectively done, Todd Monaghan’s work is as refreshing as a shower on parched ground. It is work I first encountered about ten years ago when Monaghan’s mature style was already well developed. I paid studio visits and recorded an interview for a study on how a necessary spirit of truculent inventiveness could survive in the art world in a fat period, a time when relative prosperity was posing its own problems, when the War of the Isms was dodo-dead and no demanding new imperative has sprung up to replace it. Monaghan’s working methods impressed me at once, namely his restlessness, his visible willingness to embrace chance, a recklessness which struck me as very like the modus operandi that the first generation of Ab Exes had taken from Surrealist Automatism. I liked the way he would work on the wall, then transfer the surface to the floor, then hoick the piece back onto the wall again, dripping, gougimg, pouring, incising, splashing, seemingly recklessly and, yes, perhaps actually so, but ending up with an image that seemed so controlled that he might as well have been a watchmaker meticulously assembling a timepiece. A hang of eleven of Monaghan's canvases in the SLS Hotel was one of the projects at Art Basel Miami this year. Each was distinctively different but unmistakeably his. His unorthodox ways of making his work are taking painting in new directions." ~ Anthony Haden Guest, art writer and friend Todd Monaghan is an American artist, based in New York City, who explores spontaneous intuition and the subconscious mind by flicking, spilling, dripping, painting, and scraping paint into layered, textural, immersive, multi-level paintings and collages. Monaghan’s paintings engage formally with line and density on a large scale and thematically stare into the widest scope of all – our boundless universe. His black paintings create other worlds, space realms with weird and strange planetary abstractions and stars. Stretching as large as 118 inches, his paintings relate to the individual and whole of the cosmos in their gripping, expressionistic approach.