(Click on any image to enlarge.)
The Mourning Echo is the title of the first of seven series of new paintings, most of which derive from notes and sketches I made in Paris in June of 2007. The Mourning Echo (Composition 12) is a distillation of my efforts to revisit and distill the primary themes of European post-cubist painting -- the roots of the modern age in art -- as filtered through the pedagogical, at times reactionary formalist-modernist lens of such late- and post-cubist painters as Albert Gleizes, Serge Charchoune, Otto Freundlich, Serge Poliakoff and Georges Valmier. The painting of the same title summarizes and comments on the end of the first crucial phase of formalist-modernist painting within the context of contemporary postmodernism.
The House of Egg 1 and 2 combine a chalk palette with handling effects that I associate with points of aesthetic intersection among three otherwise very unalike figures of European abstract painting ca. 1940 -- Morandi, Klee and Giacometti. The new paintings, however, are non-objective.
