Kevin Van Gorp: June 2009

Why I painted: Traditional art forms may still serve as creative anchors in a time when our society's technology has already outpaced our social development. As late American physicist Heinz Pagels has said, "The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuel the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion."

The body of work below is meant to fork two particular issues I've been thinking of, one of which is the importance of making locally pertinent work that records a particular time frame of an event or place, and the other is commenting on the recent state of the medium being used to make that artwork. In terms of painting, I see today's art market as being rather devoid of momentum in that category, just as is Miami's luxury condominium market, which is only the tragic result of over consumption and inflation in each market as we got too ahead of ourselves and now are experiencing a fall out. By making compositions that teeter between abstract and realist polarities, I strove to expose the uncertainty that concurrently exists in these different realms. This body of work was executed while living in Miami, FL and took from October 2007-January 2009 to complete.