The Remains of the World

It is my conviction that art is a philosophical pursuit, capable of expressing ideas about the world as well as humanity's physical interactions with it. An organization of shapes, lines, and colors can represent not only the emotional and intellectual life of its creator but also the historical and cultural context in which it was made and to which it contributes.

On a formal level, my work juxtaposes two fundamentally different kinds of space organization in Western painting: The traditional, Renaissance space, and the modernist space developed by Cubism. I am interested in these two understandings of space because they represent different ways of being in the world — quite literally, they are different concepts of reality.

In this sense, my paintings are history paintings, in that they visualize the dialectic of one rendering of space being the deconstruction of the other without successfully replacing it. Both are still in conflict and I believe that their discrepancy is emblematic of a greater, ultimately spiritual, dilemma in Western society: The unresolved conflict between mysticism and rationalism simmering below the surface of modernity. What I intend to say with my art is that while both worldviews are “real” in the sense that they are generated by the consciousness of living humans, both are yet constructs, fictions created specific to the Western mind.