SETTING FIRES

Giampietro Gallery
1064 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT
February 2020 - March 2020

While previous bodies of work focused on memories of past events and emotions, these new pieces have unfolded in response to life events happening in real time. Painting is a way for me to digest and process experience and emotion and offers a way to retell the story or at least to make peace with it. The process involves an exchange between assertion and denial which ideally ends in acceptance and resolution, keeping the mind calm in order to avoid a mutiny.

The titles of the paintings play an integral role in the final piece. While they allude to the subject matter of the painting they ultimately keep the viewer at a distance -- you are invited in but then kept at bay. Spray paint and squeegee provide a fast way of cancelling out or covering up the ugliness, exposure and fear allowing a new (if damaged) slate on which to begin again.