Nicholas Moenich
Taking inspiration from art history, mythology, punk rock, and science fiction, my paintings create eerie psychological spaces through a complex and personal formal language that is situated between figuration and abstraction. Incremental and anxious marks create optical confusion through figure/ground shifts and interlocking forms. Cats, mushrooms, Batmans, snakes, and jewels emerge out of undulating forms within the density of the picture plane. In the paintings these characters intertwine with text and dates to explore the anxiety surrounding the creative act and the passing of time. The tense and fragmented compositions of the paintings are direct metaphors of our twenty-first century’s hyperstimulated daily life of interconnecting media. My goal is to create paintings that simultaneously have material presence and believable pictorial space full of a certain sinister humor, exuberance, and simplification of form.