YOU Paintings
“It speaks in the second person.”
The "YOU etc." paintings are part of a body of work where words act as preliminary drawings, prompts & actors for experimentations with narrative & form. These mostly large & direct paintings are "heavy with pronouns", implicating YOU in their reading. They reveal a painter too concerned with meaning, a wordsmith too concerned with form. This symbiotic & conflictual relationship between words & paint is held together by "YOU", an internal master with an exhausted vocabulary, what Freud called the "super-ego". The artwork's standing & standard as passive pawn is transformed to an uncomfortable aggressor. An art-making of two-headed ambivalence, or "schizo dialectics" in the words of artist Stephen Dunne, text & image play a game of one-upmanship through the editorial interplay of words that flirt with wholeness on a palimpsest field of play♟