Ephemeral Escape
By Jim Zimmerman
"It's true, the paintings attack you…
…they won't leave you alone. I've seen people back away. And yet, at The Armory Show, people crowded around, they couldn't get enough. As if being intimately proximate, like the people in the painting, helps us stand our ground….
Okay, there's the obvious primal power of huge figures and the insinuations of skin, face, and fashion treats. You think, yeah, I get this, and thenyou look again….
It's the way he uses paint. His brushes are on fire. Watch him in the studio: he's mad!
And, you won't find a more conceptual artist…. He's tapping the hypertext dimensions, embedding links of glance and movement, and imagined sound and scent….
Realists paint the past, or the present, but this guy is painting a trajectory of desire. His images throw off tangents that vector into multiple futures. It's like he's uploading fractals of possibility in our minds that mutate in troubling and glorious ways….
These dazzling creatures shed their skins even as we stare at them. They've made themselves and re-made themselves. They've calculated, despaired, deliberated, gambled. Who among them can resist another costume, another pose, another extravagant identity…."