Michael Covello
I use a language of hybridized abstraction, where diverse formal
elements contradict and complete each other. The spaces I
depict within a painting or installation are dense, and at times
antagonistic. I am not interested in making work that is easy to
view. Instead, I strive for a language of excess, where a maximalist,
nonrepresentational vocabulary creates a challenging space for
the viewer to inhabit. By provoking my audience to reevaluate
their relationship to viewing, I confront the typical relationships
we have to image, architecture, and environment. By working
with ideas such as assembly, demolition, accumulation, and
containment, I restructure time as something geological in
scale. For instance, through masking, overpainting, and removal,
compositional elements undergo continuous cycles of emerging,
shifting, and concealment. Thus, as I work on a piece, my
attempts to organize its space are constantly being folded back
on themselves as the process evolves. As an artist exploring and
reacting to this unsteady terrain, I see my artistic process as a
suspension between remembering, forgetting, and rebuilding.