These paintings use line to mediate the gap between cognition and perception- the space between thought and feeling. Color meshes and disrupted fields of high contrast emphasize the bodily component of looking, creating a shortcut between the eye and mind. They seek moments of bodily alignment with the viewer by opening up a navigable field of sensation, encouraging us to think with our eyes.
Stacked systems of subjective ordering- intersecting lines, color modulation, and grids- produce moments of non-uniformity. I am interested in the tension produced when strictly applied flat, matte paint produces dimensional warping. The canvas is unchanging but fluid, a fixed essence graspable only in pieces. Curving lines suggest emotional reality, contours that mimic the ebbs and flows of feeling experienced throughout any given day. These lines wobble, dip, and crest- they go for a walk- and the eye follows.
Figure and ground compete for attention and become indistinguishable. White or black advance and recede depending on the moment of looking. A line of color that is physically on the surface optically blends into the background. Despite carefully structured paint application there is an instability. The hallucinatory flickering in these works is an effect prefigured by analytic cubism and op art of the 1960’s. Following the logic of these movements, my paintings propose that to glimpse an object from more than one perspective is to generate temporal variation- new ways of experiencing time.
I am interested in the way our mind addresses the world because of my work with a suicide hotline. Minds construct specific and insurmountable narratives when faced with overwhelming emotional data- the entrenchment of the first person perspective. I produce images that contain multiple entry points, unpredictable irregularity within a defined process as a symbolic gesture towards the possibility of seeing things beyond the self. My project is about addressing the reality that is produced in both the healthy and the unwell mind, a proposition about different perspectives and new potential outcomes. The possibility of finding signal in noise.
-Alex Puz, 2021
Stacked systems of subjective ordering- intersecting lines, color modulation, and grids- produce moments of non-uniformity. I am interested in the tension produced when strictly applied flat, matte paint produces dimensional warping. The canvas is unchanging but fluid, a fixed essence graspable only in pieces. Curving lines suggest emotional reality, contours that mimic the ebbs and flows of feeling experienced throughout any given day. These lines wobble, dip, and crest- they go for a walk- and the eye follows.
Figure and ground compete for attention and become indistinguishable. White or black advance and recede depending on the moment of looking. A line of color that is physically on the surface optically blends into the background. Despite carefully structured paint application there is an instability. The hallucinatory flickering in these works is an effect prefigured by analytic cubism and op art of the 1960’s. Following the logic of these movements, my paintings propose that to glimpse an object from more than one perspective is to generate temporal variation- new ways of experiencing time.
I am interested in the way our mind addresses the world because of my work with a suicide hotline. Minds construct specific and insurmountable narratives when faced with overwhelming emotional data- the entrenchment of the first person perspective. I produce images that contain multiple entry points, unpredictable irregularity within a defined process as a symbolic gesture towards the possibility of seeing things beyond the self. My project is about addressing the reality that is produced in both the healthy and the unwell mind, a proposition about different perspectives and new potential outcomes. The possibility of finding signal in noise.
-Alex Puz, 2021