INTRO

There's a back and forth between what's on top and behind, because you have the paper underneath, and then this filter, and then the image.

Yeah, the deckled edge and roughness of handmade paper has this irregular quality, but that's almost like the irregular quality of paint. I like that it becomes the painted media in itself. It's not merely “on” paper. I always say; oil on paper mounted on linen, but what’s probably more correct is to say; oil and paper on linen. The paper is part of the material, it’s not just a substrate. But I guess that’s true of the linen as well.

I was wondering about how you arrived at your recent bodies of work using this source imagery. I noticed you had a show at Sardine [Something Rather Than Nothing, 2016] a few years ago, where you paired abstract paintings with paintings of bouquets of flowers. Do you see that body of work as an integral part of the process to get to where you are now?

It does feel like an organic process over a long period of time—large scale, processed based abstractions and at the same time; very small, realistic, almost brushless paintings of flowers, and creating a relationship between the two—both a bodily relationship and to the eye.

Prior to that I was appropriating images through art history from different painters like Tiepolo or Fragonard and making these large abstracted versions of those works. I’ve always worked with opposing ideas spanning from different times and forcing some kind of association.

So I guess I never really had a style or particular mode of working. However, the one consistent thread has to do with some kind of timelessness or nostalgia—a connection to a collective memory. Which, whether I was doing abstraction or representation, raised from this attention to color. Probably the most common thread is my palette. I’m always looking for a certain tonality or “color story” for each piece.

After that show at Sardine, I was looking at Georges de La Tour paintings—where the chiaroscuro lighting comes from a single candle in the painting. I zoomed in on all the candles and cropped almost everything else out. There would still be the hands, skulls and whatever was in the image around it and restructured the palette—using only three or four colors in low contrast.

So from those candle paintings, I started collecting images of lamps and framing them without interest in composition really. Just screen capturing different images and centering the lamp, almost like an Albers square. They appear as squares, but using that as a formal motif for the painting where light is not only the subject, the thing being depicted, it’s also how what is depicted is seen.

The paper arrived as a way to avoid logistical obstructions. I just wanted to get to the matter at hand. Just making a painting a day or so, not caring if it was any good. I still do that. I make a lot, and some of them just don't work. Which doesn't matter—it's just paper. There's a low investment that attracted me to this originally. After I have a whole bunch of them then I can kind of go back and curate what I think is good and pull from that.

There’s this moment in which there are two things that you're holding up together, realism and abstraction, and they become one through color.

Yes, the material facts.

On that point as well, it's interesting to hear you talking about curating your own work, given that you have curated shows before. Does that kind of work in the same way for you or are those two separate processes?

It's somewhat similar. The same interests that I have in my own painting is what I'm looking for when I'm curating. But there's a lot more freedom, because there's a lot of different types of work that I wouldn't normally make that I'm interested in, so I can bring that into a conversation.

Going back to before—having had different ways of generating work. Since making these interior works, I’ve yet to go back to having two or three different things that play off each other in that same way.

Now, I think maybe I've painted myself into a corner. But in these interiors, I noticed a lot of paintings were showing up in the backgrounds—the paintings within my paintings. So in my 2023 show at Nathalie Karg [Pictures Aside], I moved those paintings of paintings front and center, the way the lamps once were. So then I could start doing landscape paintings, doing portraits, all different types of painting within the paintings. It opens them up to other possibilities.

There are points within that body of work where you crop in on a landscape, and it makes it appear abstracted, which feels like a new approach to the same tension between abstraction and representation that you have in the previous work. I actually have a funny question about that body of work: Is the source imagery for Chair I Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In?

I love that movie. I don't think I've ever taken from his work. I love his films—incredible colors and the set design completely over the top with the wallpapers, the furniture. Actually, I've gone back to look at them and they're not exactly the way I remember; I misremembered them. So I've yet to take from them, I've tried.

I watch a lot of movies, and I'm constantly collecting different subjects and putting them in folders, but I try to forget where they come from, so when I go back into the folders, it's like I'm re-picking again. It's a constant editing process—through Photoshop as well. Chair I took a lot of editing because there were people walking back and forth and the camera was also moving, so I had to take multiple shots and then composite them, edit the people out, and then reconfigure it. I try to forget where they come from so I don't have to talk about it, because it's not important where they come from conceptually.

The image is appropriated for its own function. It's very high and low, some of the images are from movies that I love, some are from television commercials. It could be from any source. And I don't really attach a dialog between the movie itself and the final work. Lately, I've been taking my own photographs, and I wonder how that changes it. There's always been one or two paintings in every show that have been from something that I photographed. But I don't make a distinction one way or the other.

I first encountered your work because of the 2023 show at Nathalie Karg, Pictures Aside, which featured a live comedy set as part of the programming. What do you think is the meeting point between your standup comedy and your painting, if there is one?

That's a good question. It's similar. The way I think about painting and the history of painting, being a practitioner, and making paintings of paintings about painting—it's all an internal loop about painting. But I can't say everything I want to say through painting. It’s similar to the way I would work in discursive modes of painting. There's something that I can’t say with a six foot tall processed based abstraction, that I can say with small flower still lifes. And together, they say something else.

So there is some connection between them. For a while, I've been “stuck” in painting these interiors. Comedy is kind of an out. It's parallel, but not completely related. With comedy, I approach it very similarly, my jokes are very self referential, they're a learned process. It’s like the formal way that I make a painting, to make something look a particular way, to create a certain tone. There’s structure to the way that a color next to another will have an effect, and evoke some sort of response; I think comedy does this with language and context—the oral arrangement of words and sounds that are placed in a particular order with the express purpose of eliciting a humorous response from the listener. But sadly, I’m not that funny.

There's a specific joke you told which gets at this connection. You're talking about being with your friend, and you think that a homeless guy is laughing at something that you're thinking and it becomes repetitive, and it builds upon itself. There’s this motion through thoughts. Some of the interior works feature entryways or doorways that are cracked just a little bit, which allude to motion, or movement through interiority, which mirrors the structure of the joke where you're bringing someone external into the process of internal thinking.

That's a good comparison between them. I like to call them of highbrow dad jokes. A series of one liners. One liners, where the punchline has the dual function of also being the setup for the following punchline. They string together, and the longer that I can stitch them along, the better. It’s like the infinite loop of a painting in the painting, depicting the painting that it is. It’s something that I've always been interested in with painting—perhaps not just my color palette. So I think naturally, that's how I approach comedy.

There’s a block quote in the press release for your show in 2023 [Pictures Aside] where you reference the fact that you wrote the press release, and that made me see that the paintings themselves have a humorous quality to them as well.
 

That’s good. I like to think that both endeavors color one another. That seeing my comedy through the lens of my painting gives it a darker, serious undertone, and conversely, a lighter playfulness in the paintings. Helped by the fact that both come with an unfailing deadpan delivery.

About the press release—it seemed arbitrary to have a serious and pretentious press release about my work, followed by, “oh and by the way, there will be a comedy performance as well.” So It was a hint about what was to come in a way. I despise writing press releases, so I write them as if somebody's writing about me—in the third person. Then of course I feel stupid for having done that, so I felt had to acknowledge that somehow, and I did so by quoting myself with that very confession—in a self-deprecating way.

This reminds me of Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands’ character is totally wasted and performing on stage and the play becomes a comedy for the audience, though it wasn’t intended to be. After I read that press release, it seemed that you were so in control of the artifice, like Gena Rowlands’ character, and therefore you could articulate a sense of humor there that may not be readily apparent.

Not sure how in control I am. Though perhaps more so after I’ve edited this interview.

Are there any specific thinkers that are particularly central to what you're getting at? There's the exhibition title Between Either and Or [2021], which I assume is a Kierkegaard reference.

That was more of a play on words that mimic the play of image and material. Like we were talking about, it’s the idea of the thing in itself, the word for the thing, and then the representation of the thing—the infinite regress. Mirrors, stairways, doorways, foyers— thresholds between this and that, inside or out, all these transitional spaces and conflicting binaries. It's related to something which Gregory Bateson wrote, it’s “the difference that makes a difference.” At what point does an accumulation of painted matter become information? At what point does the noise cross over into pattern or image?

In the 2024 press release for The Increasing Clarity That It Is Only a Matter of Time Before We Realize the Inevitable, Only to Brush Aside for a Later Date [Nathalie Karg], you write “these are not particular places, but rather they're latent, idealized spaces, like the interior infrastructure of thought (bubbles).” Where does that structure of interior thought come from for you?

It's almost diagrammatic—but fictionally. I don't think we can really pinpoint what the interior thought structure of thought is. We'd have to defer to some other image that we understand, that then stands in the place of that thought. We have to point to something else to describe it. So then that leads back to that infinite regress, because you have to then point to something else to describe that. Which is the problem with language, and I think it's the problem with painting—if there even is one. Perhaps it’s more of a “Language Game.”

Do you think that painting gives relief to that, that it relieves the inability, the doom loop of language?

Yeah, I think so. I think that's what the motivation behind it is, that it's a resting point where you can then contemplate what those ideas mean or don’t mean. When I said “thought (bubble)”, it’s because that is a very abstract image, the cloud over your head. These paintings exist within that abstracted realm. So it’s not really diagrammatic, symbolic, or even metaphorical, but rather, through the sum of their parts; materially, subject, and the context of being seen. What I call a transcendental hearth—an invitation. Something I think all good paintings that I respond to seem to have.

It seems like they serve the same function as a relic or a shrine, as this physical manifestation of a place to go to think or contemplate. The imagery seems to relate in that way too, because you have these lights inside, and its form to the fact that there is a thought there, or the manifestation of consciousness almost, if that's not too farfetched.

Yeah, I am interested in what consciousness is and where it comes from, and when I think about other types of work I was making before, though I was approaching it in a different way. When I was making the large scale process paintings, I was creating these algorithms, where then I reacted to the algorithm. The painting makes itself in a way, and when I think of consciousness, the algorithms of the atoms bouncing around, what's constituting ourselves and outside of ourselves, and where the separation is between anything.

So I feel like paintings do embody shrines. I never thought of shrines in that sense. But these sort of meditative objects that don't have a function. Or rather, that is the function. There's no other function but that.

Though sometimes they are quite decorative.

I don't think so. Images seem to rule the world right now, and I wonder if that kind of contemplative, devotional, or slowed looking is the function of painting, whether or not it's decorative. With the steady streams of images that are impressed upon us, it feels like there’s a different power dynamic between showing, where you're just giving images, and revealing, which I think requires more participation or effort from the viewer. It leaves more room for the person who's approaching the painting.

That's a good point. I've always talked about slowing. These are there for you to stop and take time to look. It is about the slow looking and how the paintings are slowly revealed. I'm always sort of torn between presenting and then revealing, showing versus revealing. I think my intention is to reveal, rather than to show you what something is like. They are a slow burn. I'm still trying to decipher the difference between the two. It’s somewhere between either or.