Erik Parker
Gallery Affiliations: Paul Kasmin Gallery, Honor Fraser
Region: Northeast
I paint meticulously curated worlds of chaos within brightly colored, highly saturated canvases. I obsessively paint layer upon layer of amorphous shapes and globules, pushing each composition to the optical extreme. Informed by a variety of sub cultural themes, including music, graffiti and illustration, my work offers a profound visual experience beyond intensely layered forms of text and imagery.
My recent paintings look to the modernists Georges Braque, Henri Rousseau and Roy Lichtenstein. Just as Lichtenstein paid homage to the still lifes and nudes of Picasso and Matisse, I do the same. Pulling from the allegorical iconography of table-scapes and the symbolism of abundant assemblages of fruit, I continue this classical tradition, yet my palette, style and compositional psychology is ever present. I also reintroduce the figure, yet instead of painting typical fragmented anthropomorphic portraits, I present the viewer with a classical nude. There is still a sense of madness in these obsessively rendered worlds, a hallucinogenic order juxtaposed with a historically traditional subject matter.