"I am a conceptualist whose work with and against the cliché of abstract painting has developed into a form I call Abstract Disillusionism. The best representation of this form can be seen in my ongoing series of paintings entitled, DEATH BLOWS.
These paintings are at once an homage and elegy to the death of abstract painting, a dialogue with its history and form. The heavy swathe of matte black that dominates each — the death blow — functions multidimensionally. It is both positive and negative. It is at once a blot, a wound, a scar, an opening, a hole, a void, exposing as much as it obscures. It draws attention to the uselessness of the painting beneath it, even as it enhances that painting. Before the work receives a death blow, it is antiquated — painterly, nostalgic, and gestural. The blow destroys those qualities, and eliminates the possibility for further engagement with any romantic decision-making.
By constructing each painting to meet the same proportions, I am attempting to endow them with an air of the deliberate and the militant, so that they capture the poetic density and visual weight of a sculpture in two-dimensional form. And this weight, this poetic density, in my opinion, has the additional benefit of grounding each work in the human condition itself, as opposed to some abstract notion of it.
These paintings are parodies of the clichés they’re modeled on. Even so, despite the effort to thwart my feelings, they are made of love that can’t be requited: what can you get from loving a corpse? My influences (among others: Janis Kounellis; Gary Simmons; Gerhard Richter; Valentino; Led Zeppelin; the Gutai; Jeanine Durning; Blinky Palermo; Frank Zappa; Samuel Beckett; Dog Town; the Beats; Dr. Seuss; Bushido; KRS; Parkour) show that I’m not interested in particular styles, forms, genres, or mediums. My concern is conviction, commitment, and purity of intent."