Ian E. Pines’s Artist Statement

 

   My paintings’ relevance is contained chiefly in their visual immediacy transferred to the viewer through a phenomenological intake of paint rather than in the conceptual or representational elements in them. The palpable auras of the works are, as Deleuze writes in Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, “figural” in that the sensations we receive while viewing them are the result of the color, shape, and depth having a direct impact on the optic nerve and central nervous system. This is opposed to the “figurative” quality of the work which is the theatrical (and sometimes inadvertent) representation of flesh, gore, and sex, and lends itself to conceptual extrapolation. Yet these two supposedly disparate properties of  “figural”/formal and “figurative”/conceptual seem to be so intertwined in the reading of my paintings that for the sake of manageable and lucid explanation they are largely segregated in this penned account of my work (while the aspect of my process is smeared throughout the whole of the statement).                                

                            

   My paintings are an orchestration of color, shape, and texture that impact a viewer on a primarily immediate and direct level. Considering the bright and jarring color combinations—thick, forceful brushstrokes—and homely, awkward forms, subtlety in terms of color variance plays a minor role with the exception of the laboring over of reds and pinks in flesh tones.      

                                                                                               

   Attempting to organize such conspicuous and expressionistic gestures in a prolonged improvisational fashion results in a compounding of second-guesses wrought with frustration at the collapse of control, yet something gestates in the chaos and confusion. The piled-on inconsistencies along with the privileging and repeating of idiosyncrasy and novelty result in unanticipated new forms that spring forth from the muddled myriad of coalescing marks. These collective structures are typically not as engrossing as their disparate elements and require endless refinement; however, they do provide an excellent impetus for the painting to be labored over in search of a balanced formation. This process results in a highly formal and vague narrative that develops with the work and references previous works in my oeuvre. Occasionally, an essential last-ditch effort in the form of a violent adjustment that sweeps over nearly the entire canvas (possibly a scraping down and/or broad application of color) forges one or two forms that are highly integrated with the painting—a superstructure that bluntly but aptly binds and unifies the work in a considerable dynamism as opposed to countless discursive spurts. (Crag is an excellent example of such a procedure.)  

                                                                           

   Glut permeates the canvas with few but integral areas of visual rest. These monochromatic, uniformly textured sections provide some sense of perspective as well a balanced visual rhythm. These fields are one facet of the surface structure that ranges widely from the caked and rough to the thin and glossily smooth, adding a geological, topographical element (not to mention, a haptic and cutaneous component) that is occasionally excavated heedlessly yielding vibrant and complex color sequences. Periodically, the oily refuse from such excavations is applied to the canvas providing an abrupt impasto. The tortured surface, when crowned and pervaded by various pinks, conveys a sense of the ‘over-the-top’ by allowing a lustrous irreverence to spill through and onto the earnest, assiduous work. The requisite pinks make a macabre play possible because of their dual qualities of referencing the flesh or synthetic viscera as well as the poppy playful and saccharine naïve. When red is employed with the shock and awe of blood to be seen without the added jest of a tint, a wholehearted horror arises.

                           

   Before my graduate studies, my work strove to be more literary. My paintings were sometimes grand-scale and loose depictions of ‘cosmological diagrams,’ i.e., visual representations of concepts describing mythological, religious, and philosophical views. I produced two considerable projects (and a failed but informative third as well) with my brother, Max, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Brown University. We told a story of the evolution of a race of beings, and how their technology, consciousness, and morality develop and alter them. As was somewhat apparent then and continues to be more and more so now, my work is far from lyrically narrative. Ideas/diagrams might be employed as catalysts and props, but the overall finished feeling of a work and the process itself alludes to a personal scrambling—hopefully representative of broader human contentions. So though I no longer explicitly craft my paintings figuratively, they reflect some of those philosophical concerns I hitherto attempted to address directly, now embodied indirectly as process and paint.

                                                                             

   I have always considered my work to be brutishly personal, psychological: my paintings are rapidly metamorphosing mirrors of primordial oil. Yet I do believe they have some anthropological significance. The second-guessing strokes that are heaped onto one another in the works embody the uncertainty and ephemerality we find ourselves wallowing in. Whatever is struggled for is lost in the anarchy of our relentlessly corrosive environment, but we do develop consequential things (albeit idols) out of our own tenacity and the chance, luck, fate, and mythos of our universe.

                                                                                 

   In my paintings, I see our flesh being ripped apart more and more with the implementation of magnificent technology. We are pulled in countless directions by telecommunications, quick transportations, and other complicating automations in our lives, so much so that the actual feeling of what it is to be inside the body is dulled with the constant barrage of anxiety and attention put forth to pay attention to myriad demands. Humans are sometimes attached to the other side of these artificially constructed tenuous tethers, so a constant moral battle goes on as to their import. Ambitions are inflated and the possibilities in everyday life are multiplied to an overwhelming extent. Knowing what to do and being able to stick to it is nearly impossible.

                                                                                                                               

   Grafting technology to the human mess is a clumsy and horrific process. Our psyches are casualties—represented by screaming flesh in my work. We are alienated from the preciousness of life so my paintings aim right at the most corporeal and relevant factors in order to bring about a preciousness in viewing them: death and sex. Death, the constant factor of the universe eating itself and of “life living on life,” (Joseph Campbell) is paired with its antipode of sex, the chief symbol of the defiance against death and decay. (Digestion and shit I suppose are somewhere in the middle of all this.)  And then our contemporary cacophony clumsily vivisects these constituents with electric/geometric bright non-sequiturs, concrete grays, and steel girder/gun-metal blues meant to merge with their fleshy counterparts. The organic and inorganic amalgamate poorly.

                       

   Despite this grave austerity, the whole abomination must be affirmed for we have no choice; reforming such chaos is impractical and inane. My paintings celebrate the overwhelming gravity of our situation with their carnival of radiating ecstasies and sublime, exquisite mutilations—everything is electrified with bright color and bravado. Humor and irony are integral parts of my work as well, because to be aware of one’s own futility and transience in this churning cosmos and still thrive requires an appreciation for the absurd, hence the foul figures and shapes flopping and slipping off one another in a slapstick of some oversaturated pornographic space opera.

                                                           

Nietzsche emphasizes:

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess of strength alone is the proof of strength. A revaluation of all values, this question mark, so black, so tremendous that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it down—such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sun every moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. (Preface to Twilight of the Idols)          

And Samuel Beckett concurs: “When you're up to your neck in shit, all you can do is sing.”