Roy Lichtenstein once said, 'I want to hide the record of my hand,' but the same words from Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock would not have been surprising, even though Lichtenstein was partly reacting against the mid-century work of those very abstract expressionists. Lichtenstein thought that the humanity of brush strokes would not suit his impersonal and flat subjects, whereas Rothko avoided obvious brushwork to heighten the meditative aspect of his paintings. Polock, meanwhile, seemed to prefer the physicality of action paintings constructed with drips and splashes rather than brush strokes. Rothko and Pollock produced paintings that I consider remarkably three-dimensional and spatial, not flat like Lichtenstein's comic-strip closeups.

Nevertheless, Lichtenstein's comic strips and Rothko's rectangular color fields share an emphasis on frames. In my work, the frames have literary allusions, too. The dominating influence of squares, especially on the larger canvases, refers first to the doors (or window panes) of perception, which William Blake and Aldous Huxley imagined could reveal the world as infinitely meaningful. Despite this potential, the way through the doors is often obscured or often misleads the viewer, leading to another door. Our brains compartmentalize the world with these doors to filter the overwhelming power of unmediated or transcendental experience. As spiritual and emotional ideals, Rothko's color fields are too strong. Perhaps--in what our post-modern consciousness perceives as a complex age, we reject the simplicity of such a view, or perhaps our consciousness is too hurt to accept the directness of Rothko's visions. My response, in imitation of our culture's, is to fragment visions so that we can manage them.

The second allusion in my squares is to our modern way of conceptualizing information, sometimes knowledge, in layered windows in simulated three-dimensional space. Even my paintings that do not use squares as their main conceit still suggest a field into which we can disappear. Imagine being inside them. The distance, reinforced by the assumption that paintings are two-dimensional, is the same distance we confront in our daily interactions with people: it is variously electronic, emotional, or physical, but it is often a flatland. The imaginative invitation is the one that calls us out of isolation and into an emotional and physical dialogue.

In my paintings, I am interested in how the flatness that Lichtenstein depicts is a result of social and creative isolation, manifesting itself in superficial panes that block our deeper perceptions of reality. Like him, I want to erase the record of my own hand to show this isolation. Conversely, I want to imply an antidote: a three- dimensional world of emotion, not as mystical as Rothko's color fields, nor (usually) as busy as Pollock's action paintings, but a world of emotion represented in layers, ridges, semi-transparent panes, shapes and textures that are topographical, geological, geometric, and architectural.

These paintings developed slowly in style over the years in a general isolation that might explain some of these motifs.

You can contact me online: joel (dot) deshaye (at) gmail (dot) com.