Truthfulness– I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer whish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment This is the limit of my “truthfulness;” for there courage has lost its right. -Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science 1887

I consider myself as a kind of scientist. Driven by curiosity and a desire to see and know more, I make paintings of the ideas and images that occupy my imagination. Rather than settle on a single idiom, my paintings are open-ended experiments and the terms used in the production of each picture are free to change. I have made a salon-type installation for my thesis project so that viewers can draw connections between the various works.

Light and color are my subject. I articulate color and proportions in order to investigate the illusion of luminosity in painting. Because I am curious and wish to see and know more, I investigate light and color because these are the foundations of any epistemology. It is Newton’s discovery of the spectrum and systemization of light that opens the door for all further knowledge, such as electromagnetism, spectroscopy, quantum theory, relativity, etc. The point is that light and color form the foundation of all our knowledge of the universe. I do not make pure luminous works like James Turrell or Dan Flavin, but rather remain firmly grounded in painting and make reference to subject matter such as history, science and historical genre. I like luminous paintings such as Red Light Sphere, 1923 by Ivan Kliun, and in general, the early Soviet avant-garde; the luminous Hudson River landscapes of Sanford Gifford, such as Kauterskill Clove 1862; the glowing redness of Barnett Newman’s Vir Hirioicus Subliminis,1952; the virtuosity of the televisual glow in David Reed s recent series of works seen last year at Max Protech Gallery. This lineage includes many different art-historical moments, but I claim it because all these artists were interested in the articulation of color and the illusion of luminosity. Instead of remaining committed to a single style or idiom, I feel free to change the terms of each work so that the means employed achieve the desired ends. For example; after seeing works by Caspar David Friedrich, such as Solitary Tree 1821, I became interested in the paintings color and luminosity, but was shocked at their kitschy attention to detail. In response to this experience, I made a luminous landscape painting which quotes the form of German Romantic painting, but at the same time poked fun at its technique by painting with a dead-pan flatness. After having conducted research on the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, I made a painting in which I appropriated the cover illustration of Fuller s 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon. In the film Bladerunner 1982, there is a scene in which an android owl with glowing red eyes appears (since mythologically owls have access to knowledge) to pass judgement over the other characters. I appropriated this image in order to paint the glowing eyes. In this way, I make images which engage my interest and curiosity, employing different means to achieve the end of color articulation and luminosity.

Other research also drives and informs the work. Readings such as Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science 1887, in which an open-ended experimental method is proposed has been hugely important. Nietzsche argues that pure reason is an impossible fallacy and that a science of pure reason, such as Platonic models or Euclidian mathematics will remain cold abstractions, distant models from that which they are trying to represent. At the same time, pure passion is chaos. Like Dionysian excess or the murderous furies of Homeric epics, passion, unchecked by reason is ultimately destructive. Therefore passion and reason must be synthesized into a joyful science, a conflation of art and science which is neither coldly academic nor emotionally frivolous, but rather joyfully engages the abyss of the universe with a good sense of irony and curiosity in order to harness human creative potential. In this sense we must become passionate rationalists, or maybe rationally passionate. This book was instrumental in the evolution of my work, inspiring me to abandon a historically bracketed paradigm of abstract painting in order to move towards an open-ended model which is forever seeking new horizons.

Greil Marcus' history of Punk and Dada Lipstick Traces 1998, outlines the relationship between rock music, avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century and has helped me develop greater historical consciousness and guided my research toward Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Literature such as the cosmic vastness of Moby Dick, the tender skepticism of Emily Dickinson s poems, the parapetetic wanderings of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater 1821 as well as the epistemological quandaries of Phillip K. Dick novels have also had an effect on my perspective. Dan Graham is an artist whose working method is radically different from mine, but his writing and thinking about experience and culture have been important. This reading influences my work because all these books, actually, are about the nature of knowledge, exploration and experience. Films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, the uncanny and fantastic films of Werner Herzog and this year's March of the Penguins are also about exploration and the instinctual drive forward. David Cronenberg s Existenz, 1999, presents Cartesian problems about the contextual and subjective nature of knowledge. Music is important too: the glossy appropriations of Roxy Music and Brian Eno provide a good analogy to my attitude toward appropriation and production. Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno appropriate and reproduce musical styles in a slick, intellectual way that has influenced my painting. The Franco-German pop band Stereo Total makes good-natured kitsch-pop songs about international friendship and joy while appropriating and punning 1960's and punk-pop genres. The Clash are a band who never became dogmatic, but rather maintained their integrity through relentless innovation and experimentation. The Clash maintained an oppositional stance to bourgeois society without ever falling into the trap of negativity. Rather, writing music in the 1970's and 80's, they chose a polyglot style which was open to punk, reggae, electronic, hip-hop and many other influences.

Each painting derives from a different source and is painted in a different way, yet there are unifying themes which tie the works together; a dead-pan application of paint; an interest in utopian technologies and cosmic perspectives; a plucky sense of humor; a recurring interest in luminous orbs (which can also be found in Gifford and Kliun s paintings.) I choose to apply paint in a flat, dead-pan manner because I find techniques that are too artistic or sophisticated to be in poor taste. I oppose any fetishization of technique, process or studio practice. That is to say that paint should be treated in a straightforward way and I am against mannerized techniques which serve as ends in themselves. I make reference to utopian movements in my work because I remain, despite it all, an idealist and an optimist who believes that humans are capable of making a better world. These references complement my scientific and philosophic world-view. At the same time, I use good-natured ironic humor because I don t think art should take itself too seriously. Luminous orbs recur in many works because I find them visually compelling.

These varied and disparate references and influences result in a unified sensibility. This includes ocular uncertainty, the luminous, history, science, utopian reverie and the emancipatory potential of technology. I define ocular uncertainty as any number of optical phenomena which illustrate perceptual experience s radical subjectivity. Many well known examples include the wonders of after-images and simultaneous contrast, the blind spot, and the contextual nature of color itself. In graduate school I have been able to train my optical sensitivity and this research has led to a curiosity in even less defined and unquantifiable subjective experiences such as seeing spots or flashes in the eyes, the ability to see the inside of the eye, which is the speckling that one sees when looking at a blank white surface in duration, hallucinations and the imagery of dreams. Optical uncertainty, therefore, proves that while optics remain the foundation of any episteme, seeing it turns out, is not necessarily believing.

In this way, the strictures of logic do not apply to the stream of consciousness I use to arrive at my ideas and images: My mind puzzles over a philosophical problem, I watch a film or see a painting or read an article or listen to music and as I think and experience, the connections that are made solidify into an image. Once I decide what picture I am going to paint, though, the strictest logic is brought to bear on the process of production. The proportions of the support are carefully determined because I use specific relationships of image to edge. This helps in the articulation of colors and the sought-after luminosity of the picture. I arrange colors according to predetermined systems and I paint in glazes and mask-off areas. This is a tactical way of working. Instead of an expressionist model of reacting to marks, wet into wet, to make a painting, I proceed via planning and thinking in steps. I think of each painting as a game which has a goal. In chess, one maintains an overall strategy to win the game, but conditions in time and space on the battlefield may force tactical alterations. Likewise, each painting is a problem-solving game in order to achieve a desired end result. If, in the course of working one tactic fails or proves too difficult, I am able to change course in favor of a better one. This is not a systemic way of working favored by many abstract painters, where no change is possible, but rather a tactical one which allows for game-variation in order to achieve its goal.

The trajectory that I have followed during graduate school to arrive at this body of work has been arduous. In fact, my experimental method has led me to the exact opposite position from which I began. When I entered Hunter, I was interested in a kind of historically bracketed abstract painting which was modernist. I thought ultimate paintings would result from sheer logic and historical consciousness. Historically, this program has already been realized; the desire to continue the past is reactionary. This early body of work was made based on the spectroscopy of artificial light sources. The second body of work was a continuation of my interest in artificial light sources. This time, I made high-contrast stripe paintings with day-glo colors which created an optical buzz. I was attempting to replicate electronic experiences. Instead, I was only doing second-hand op-art. It is significant that my interest in light and color was well established, if misdirected, at this time.

I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany. There I realized I must shed all my previously held convictions and abandon the research I had been conducting. As so often happens, personal discoveries are made during travel. In Berlin, I saw an exhibition called Licht und Farbe, at the Martin-Gropius Bau. On display was a fantastic collection of early Soviet avant-garde paintings. I got to see works by Ivan Kliun, Ljubov Popova and Alaxendr Rodchenko that I had only read about in books. I saw an exhibition of romantic paintings at the Altes Nationalgalerie, which included luminous works by Caspar David Friedrich. I saw a mini-exhibition at the Neu Nationalgalerie which paired a video-loop projection of the Beyond the Infinite scene from 2001: a Space Odyssey with a luminous red, yellow and blue Barnett Newman painting. Together, the two pieces were titled The Sublime is Now. After seeing all these fantastic works from different historical periods, but which treated similar themes of color, light and space, I realized I was free to make whatever I wanted. Upon my return, I made a large series of stream-of-consciousness drawings which are the genesis of my current body of work. I simply drew whatever I wanted. I made several paintings extrapolating this idea. I painted an interior perspective with a shaft of light. I painted a romantic landscape. I painted a dinosaur skull as a romantic and anti-creationist pun. So while my work changed drastically after my trip to Germany, my interest in light, color, science and history has always remained consistent.

In my new paintings I have resolved the problem that has plagued me my entire career at Hunter how to make paintings which engage my interest in history and color without reiterating obsolete pictorial languages and their attendant ideologies. By synthesizing my knowledge of color and history with my other interests in science, utopian avant-gardes and humor, I am able to invent paintings which are truly personal and new.

No discussion today can be complete without addressing two problems: the political and the art-historical. They are entwined. In both cases, artists face a crisis in terms of belief. Politically, today's world is one where religion and reaction are resurgent. Where medieval fanaticism dominates large parts of the planet. Where democratic institutions have failed and civil and human rights have eroded. Where corporate capital dominates life. Where the ice caps are melting and useless wars continue. In this context, there is no acceptable political system on earth today. What values, if any, are artists to affirm under these conditions? The historical moment that most closely mirrors ours is the 1930's, when everyone knew that the Second World War was looming, but they could do nothing about it. Most of the European and American modernists of that time clung to a Trotskyist ideal of planetary revolution, artists today do not have the luxury of this kind of delusional thinking. Today we lack an ideal or goal. This problem compounds itself because the critical tools we have learned no longer seem to apply. Or, more tragically, they apply more importantly than ever, but they have no hope of effect. It seems that after years of studying critical theory, the only critical value-judgement I can apply to a work of art is whether or not it sustains my interest, positively or negatively, for an interval of time. Is this a failure of graduate education? I doubt it, Hunter has been an incredible educational laboratory for me. Instead, I think we are faced with an art-historical moment where civilization is adrift and we do not know how to look at what is happening because of our proximity to terrifying unfolding events.

Under these conditions, I have become attracted to the theorizing of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Although the revolutionary Parisian moment of May 1968 is long past, today we are again in a context where opposition through affirmation is appropriate. In their time, the Situationists rejected both Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism but affirmed human freedom, spontaneity and creativity. Likewise, young artists today reject global capital, religion and war, but affirm positive values like international friendship, community and creativity. Friedrich Nietzsche opposed rising proto-fascism in his time and had the courage to abandoned the aesthetic of his hero Wagner, and through his stormy proclamations affirms human freedom and creativity in terms of science and art. Nietzsche proposes a science and art which have the courage to reject any false, old, contradictory idea, a science and art which are forever evolving and willing to abandon ossified convictions, a science and art which seek to destroy all conservatisms. These ideas were initially proposed in a conservative time and they apply again in our conservative time. While I cannot claim the perfection of perpetual auto-critique, I do have the courage to attack my convictions, as the evolution of the work demonstrates. Punk Rock was also born from an oppositional stance against welfare-state capitalism and affirms its own creed of do-it-yourself, and like Buckminster Fuller, like Nietzsche and like historic avant-gardes, seeks to find a third trajectory for the outcome of humanity.

So how do we avoid the cynical politics of doom in our time? How do we maintain cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair? We avoid cynicism through affirmation. We maintain cheerfulness with a sense of humor. I affirm those things which I care and think about, such as philosophy and science, politics and pop-music, but more than anything else, light and color. Research in these fields has led me to the idea of the fan. First proposed during a panel discussion of the 2004 Whitney Biennial moderated by professor Katy Siegel and including artists Banks Violette, Sue Debeers and Dario Robleto, the fan, affirms the things he or she loves teenaged tropes, rock bands, heros, etc. This notion applies to the working method of many young artists. I am a fan of Buckminster Fuller, so I made a painting of his structure. I am a very critical fan of Caspar David Friedrich, so made a painting making fun of his method. The things I affirm in the work are those that I care about. But more than anything else, I am a fan of light and color. Color and light are what I am formally both passionate and rational about and I infuse my interest with content drawn from science, history, and genre-- the painting is an excuse for the formal illusion of luminosity in paint with the content that I care about.