On View July 19 - 31, 2024
Opening Reception Friday, July 19, 2024 7-9pm
Figure
”The work explores the anxiety of humankind in the twenty-first century. Its goal is to capture the human body in all its vulnerability by celebrating our perceived flaws. To demystify the nude, one has to find beauty in the grotesque, yet in an affectionate manner. My subjects are imperfect and I do not flatter them. They are painted with emotional honesty. Their nudity becomes a vehicle for presenting the psychology of the sitter over the formality of portraiture, allowing me to discover and pierce the unconscious. I choose my models for their ability to inspire empathy for our universal humanness, and their capacity to confront the truth within ourselves as to what we believe to be beautiful.”
Nature Morte
“Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing ones sensations.” - Paul Cezanne
Still life, aka nature morte, is the tradition of painting inanimate objects that delight the eye. Still lives may be a celebration of the pleasures of life such as food and wine or a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures. The genre of memento mori from the Latin “remember you must die” often contain dead flora, corpses of fauna and the presence of pest that remind us of the passage of time and the brevity of life.
These works hover between memento mori and the Proustian Moment, a vivid recollection of past events through sensory stimulation. The objects which we might fail to notice day to day in these works conjure up the unconscious memory of a unique experience, time, or place.”
- Michael Costello
