POP BAROQUE

The Pop Baroque is pictorial vernacular of objects from 18th century Europe that reinterprets a physiological syntax, transposing the modernist troupes of photography and painting; inverting a still moment to the illusory speed of oil. They ultimately embrace the paradoxical influences of East meets West. The paintings are derived from photographing places, grandiose hotels, or taken from documentation of buildings no longer standing. Other motifs are expressed in Meissen and Sevres porcelains; hand painted French wallpapers, and some with sumi brush notations from contemporary pulp.

Of the porcelain’s, these fete gallant scenes came to represent gestures of awe and flirtation, frozen moments container on the shelves of museums, yet rekindled as objects of desire. Many of these forms emerged from rapid growth of Europe’s merchant trade from Asia, i.e. the Silk Road, the Dutch East Indies Company and more. They sublimate a geo-political aesthetic. My redux appropriates these Chinoiserie themes from the view of our era, one of instability of political cultures and identities; and suspends these sculptural forms to a painterly surface, circling a sphere of influence. The light-hearted images are a visual opiate, a sketch of place where nature and humans folly, caught in a moment of paradoxical times.