Workers Work: (There is a rather thorough discussion of this piece in the Interview I did with Studio International so maybe this is redundant -)The title of the painting is derived from shapes and gestures in the work that have a humorous yet weighty feeling of both physical and mental pressure. The painting's redness brings to mind both an actual flayed body as well as symbols of struggle on a Sociopolitical/Historical level. Images of Soutine's still lifes were important sources for this work as were images of stills from the Eistenstein film "Strike", documentations of medical surgeries, and Bacon's "Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion". The tension between actual suffering and propaganda has a dark humor and an intense friction for me especially when it can also be construed as beautiful on a visual level. In this work all these issues collide and tangle in an ecstatic intensity.
From the interview:
Workers Work (2013), part of that was because, after the painting was finished, this rib-cagey stack of lines created by the tape and then the gesture moving across it started, to me, to feel like a person carrying a valise or some stack of wood, and moving in a very humped-over way towards some stressful event or necessity. And then, also, the very redness of it made me think about socialist propaganda, notions about how work is done, how workers behave, how workers are treated – Eisenstein’s Strike! And all that dramatic cross-cutting. My work doesn’t begin with some socio-political premise, but the idea that there can be overtones that are both somewhat humorous and serious in the work, but also it’s important to me that those aspects co-operate, have to co-operate with formal requirements.