INNER ROOM

I’m choosing to bring together, here, two ends of the same way of working.

The paintings on the wall and the drawings in the box are forms of following and projection.

Drawn bodies on paper contend with the rooms that house them.

A frozen psyche pins to a tremulous ground.

Familiar ligaments conduct into lines —

tissue-level seeing is unspooled.

The drawings are line segments…cut from a larger continuance.

A box encloses a stack of paper, each layer of which hides, and then reveals, the next.

Line extends as an invisible umbilical between them.

The paintings begin by recognizing the specificity of the ground,

and end, often, with a recapitulation of that recognition.

A painting, drawn on, reveals its hinterland.  Back is brought forward.

The making of the painting, often itself a process of undoing, is read back by the surface.

A figure is circumscribed through the local logic of this ground-reading.

The faces of these paintings are portions of my edge,

but also encountered visages, new to me.

Michael Kennedy Costa