Brad Cooper Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

COREY POSTIGLIONE

Since 1991 I have been developing a series of works on paper that use the image of a labyrinth or maze. The labyrinth is an ancient symbol that suggests a refuge or rite of passage going back in time to the mystery cults of Dionysus. The labyrinth can also function as a metaphor for a life-map. It is this sense of the labyrinth, as a way of mapping ones movement through life, that imbues the content of my work. My past work has often dealt with themes of .. passage or redemption as some of my titles would indicate: the Passage, Survivor, and Sanctuary series.

Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the labyrinth is a form of sanctuary because we feel lost in the world, and can lose ones self in its embrace. In the earlier works I tended to locate an image in the heart of the labyrinth as a reward for the journey; in others I superimposed the image of a maze over a landscape or tree suggesting nature and culture in some kind of tenuous relationship.

Recently I have begun to explore our passage from modernism to postmodernism, from a centered self to a decentered self. Frederic Jameson refers to this loss of centeredness in the blur of global technological change as the postmodem sublime. In these drawings and paintings, I have employed utopian images of modernity-a Mondrian painting, a space shuttle, a communication satellite--that suggest cultural and technological progress. These same images are juxtaposed with the Ebola virus, one of the most deadly viruses to emerge in recent times. The virus becomes a metaphor of our loss of the control of nature and modernism's dream of that conquest which began with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.

Moreover, this thematic exploration, the death of modernity, has led me to investigate, through a series of new paintings, the visual possibilities of city maps as urban condensers of control and signifiers of civilization and all its inherent conceits; and also as maze-like images that suggest metaphors for life's passages.

Since 1978, I have worked both abstractly and with referential images. I continue in this vein with my new work being both abstract and image based. What forms the basis for both sets of work is a consistent thematic. My hope is to build a lexicon of images both abstract and figurative that ultimately convey the same conceptual narrative. I do think of these works as forming a visual narrative, a story that involves both natural history and the history of technology. However, these works are not meant as a polemic, a political diatribe, but more a meditation on certain problematic changes that have occurred in this century that may or may not be reversible. Again, these are not messianic messages just themes and ideas that have an interest for me. Lately, my ideas have come from certain texts outside the discourse of art such as Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance.

Finally, for me the work succeeds or fails on its ideas; I still see myself as a conceptual painter (if that is not an oxymoron). That does not mean that I don't care what the works look like. To the contrary, I continue to explore new visual strategies for representing my ideas; I continue to want the work to be seductive for the viewer. And then I always hope there is something left to ponder later.