Offshoots
Solo presentation at Hot Wheels Athens, 2024
There are greens that shroud this space and we are all held in its thick, narrowing brush. Each painting, then, is only a vignette, a world through the looking-glass that we peer into, imagining the fantasies, dreams, and autobiographical deviations that these intricate scenes flow from. Wandering through their layered timelines, each surface is several things: a speculation, a deceptive prism of overlapping realities, an offshoot.
Burrowed somewhere between the mossy greens of pastoral rest and the phosphorescent hues of an absinthian haze, every delineation of a human figure is in repose, reaffirming that this space is not quite the waking world, though its joys and horrors are rooted somewhere close by. There is a river that flows too, and shores with blooming bell flowers.
Silhouettes of leafless trees twine, splinter, and sprawl, reaching beyond the edges of their supports, opening up dense networks of back-and-forth. It is their branches – eked out with varying firmness, thickness, and regularity – that give both grid and form.
Between the yellowed contour of a dormant face and a citrine skeleton, thickly dabbled with brittle bones, it is perhaps the black line that is the most austere gesture: a sort of necrosis. But rot can come creeping in brushwork too, and it is where the gestures are more subtle, the impasto thinned, the colors hazy that painterly intricacies give way to phantasmic erasures that linger like ghosts.
Moods, like ghosts, are understandably moody, and it’s those shifting atmospheres that muddy the waters of these swirling landscapes that sit out of time. No surface is left untouched, and on top of it all, a little blue bird, rendered directly and simply, sits to sing its morning song.