Dennis Hollingsworth

Broken Glass Everywhere

The past cycle of paintings describes an arc of development from the instrumentalization of masking (as in masking tape) and directed projectiles of paint (paint, the remainders scraped off tools and tape, reserved aside throughout the process and then flung back on the canvas at a final stage, a closed system of paint deployed). I often refer to the movement from painting to painting as tacking, in the manner of sailboats navigating into the wind. Masking began as vertical pulls of tape, then shaped into volupes (volupté, the quality of being voluptuous or sensual), mixed and mashed, later cut into figures after seeing the work of James Jarvaise, forests grew, teeming with insects and then I needed to break that egg. "Breaking the egg" is the phrase I use to question one's project. I usually visualize this as small cracks, because a huge break will scramble your egg. Small breaks require healing fissures, a tectonic movement, bones cured stronger than before.

So one day, it was time to break the influence of Jarvaise, and as I was flipping through Transgression, The Offenses of Art, I seized upon the illustration of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, an image of a broken image, a perfect motif.

And then I noticed broken glass abounding. Suddenly, it's everywhere.