Dennis Hollingsworth

P/s

In preparation for my upcoming show at Hionas Gallery in New York's Lower East Side that will open this Friday, I wrote up a short statement as preparatory material to assist the gallery in its' subsequent work. Here it is:

A medium can be it's own subject when it is also a metaphor for a multitude of subjects in the world. For example, in the Spanish language, one could compliment a friend like so, "te pinta bien". That would mean that they look good to you. I like how the expression in Castilian Spanish of how the world appears uses painting as a vehicle of rendering. In another example, the interaction of solvent and binder in paint involves a dynamic interaction of opposing forces, not unlike a whole range of issues in the world from politics to sex and beyond. Another example, in this case, my own coinage: "paint dries, life ends", and from this I take inspiration from the limits of alla prima painting to make hay while you can. Another example: the refinement of pigments used in paint is an example of negentropy, an increase in order in the world. The act of painting hazards entropy, an increase of disorder in the world as colors blend towards mud. A successful painting redeems and magnifies negentropy.

My natural ardor for painting doubled down in graduate school when I was informed that painting was dead and to persist with it was folly. So I rebelliously embraced affirmation and sought to evoke the life within paint. Over the years my use of impasto became more and more agitated in animation. As such, I encouraged the natural corporeality of paint to the point where it seemed as if it could levitate off the canvas. It was at that point when I alighted on the small vitrines that I had initially found in a Chinatown curio shop and began to fill them with wood armatures that supported dabs, tongues and urchin-monads of paint.

After twenty five years of painting in earnest, after hundreds of paintings straining to the thousand, I feel very confident in calling myself a painter with a capital P. After making around twenty or so sculptures thus far in my life, I don't yet have the temerity to call myself a sculptor with a capital "S". So I here submit that the majority of the artwork in this show could be denominated sculpture in lower case letters and painting capitalized yet in the position of a numerator. And so an equation is born.

P/s.

To be sure, I have noted the acute transition from painting to sculpture in the making of these objects, especially the larger ones. One of my first inklings sparked when I realized how the lighting at night in my studio was insufficient for three dimensions when it was quite adequate for painting on a flat canvas. I noticed how I was constantly moving around the piece, not like the sliding station point I had always used to regard paintings. I became aware that I was constantly arm deep in the medium, more often now than ever in the past had I soiled my sleeves and jacket with art material, not so much with painting. All of this marks a beginning but only an initial start.

Often in the making I found myself thinking of these sculptures in painting's terms. After all, I used the same materials in fabricating armatures as in building the panels used to stretch canvas for paintings. Wood, glue and screws. I considered that now, figuration began with the shaping of the armature, not like the usually assumed neutrality of painting's support. One could say that I was sculpting the armature of wood, but since I was anticipating the movement of paint to come in the shaping, one could also say that I was "painting" with wood instead. As the possible flatness formerly fit for painting shank dramatically with the new surface areas of the armatures, I became aware that I lost my usual bag of tricks typical to painting, I had to start from scratch. My attitude to these pieces are entirely that of a painter, and all my surprises are coming from the sculptor's wheel house. Maybe it's the architect in me (my first degree and formal introduction to art), with the "nature of materials" instinct that architects naturally have, that I would be so inclined to paint sculpturally... and now to sculpt painterly.