Essais and Reviews > Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
September, 2009
The title of this show is taken from the 18th century book by Albertus Saba.
Saba's collection of animals and plants from around the world features illustrations of plants and animals.
His etchings mix flora and fauna on a single plate without their natural habitat; he places them on a neutral backdrop,
an innovative approach at the time.My recent paintings deal with what I like to call parallel human and animal universes.
Our human experience is set alongside animal worlds that sometimes overlap but largely are separate.
The main subject of my recent work are animals that I selected for their iconic qualities.
The lions, giraffes, fish and monkeys are all given symbolic meanings in many parts of the world.
Some cultures worship animals as godlike, with special powers or associate questionable behavior with certain species,
often reptiles, thus attributing profoundly and exclusively human elements to non human creatures.
Is this humanization an attempt to grasp the animal universe?
Is it only by bestowing these qualities on these creatures that we can begin to understand them, or maybe dominate them?
Just like various societies, I use these animal-symbols as stands-ins for human archetypes.
Animals stand in for good, regal, bad, silly and so forth men ; taken out of their natural and put in a foreign context,
they inhabit spaces defined by abstract geometric volumes.
By selecting iconic animals and depicting them detached from their environment, I wanted to emphasize the sense of isolation and the incapacity to connect that are part of the modern human tragedy.On a stylistic level, my work shows representations of animals in loose color washes, layered over and under hard edged forms that connect these creatures.
I'd like to see this connective tissue of intermingling shapes as a metaphor for our desire to reach out; our efforts to diminish the gap between ourselves and other living beings.
September, 2009
The title of this show is taken from the 18th century book by Albertus Saba.
Saba's collection of animals and plants from around the world features illustrations of plants and animals.
His etchings mix flora and fauna on a single plate without their natural habitat; he places them on a neutral backdrop,
an innovative approach at the time.My recent paintings deal with what I like to call parallel human and animal universes.
Our human experience is set alongside animal worlds that sometimes overlap but largely are separate.
The main subject of my recent work are animals that I selected for their iconic qualities.
The lions, giraffes, fish and monkeys are all given symbolic meanings in many parts of the world.
Some cultures worship animals as godlike, with special powers or associate questionable behavior with certain species,
often reptiles, thus attributing profoundly and exclusively human elements to non human creatures.
Is this humanization an attempt to grasp the animal universe?
Is it only by bestowing these qualities on these creatures that we can begin to understand them, or maybe dominate them?
Just like various societies, I use these animal-symbols as stands-ins for human archetypes.
Animals stand in for good, regal, bad, silly and so forth men ; taken out of their natural and put in a foreign context,
they inhabit spaces defined by abstract geometric volumes.
By selecting iconic animals and depicting them detached from their environment, I wanted to emphasize the sense of isolation and the incapacity to connect that are part of the modern human tragedy.On a stylistic level, my work shows representations of animals in loose color washes, layered over and under hard edged forms that connect these creatures.
I'd like to see this connective tissue of intermingling shapes as a metaphor for our desire to reach out; our efforts to diminish the gap between ourselves and other living beings.