October 12 - November 05, 2005

Iron Men | New Painting | review

> opening Saturday, October 15 | 2 - 6pm

Urn 2005 m/m on canvas

Un Enfant du Paradis Mixed Media on Canvas 2005 72” x 96”

Nobody’s Hurting Me
Mixed Media on Paper on Canvas on Board 2005 36” x 48

Island Mixed Media on Canvas 2005 48” x 48”

Sea Snake Mixed Media on Canvas 2005 24” x 36”

Portal Mixed Media on Paper on Board 2005 33” x 41”

The Iron Men Trajectory:
We three Iron Men—Gary Michael Dault, John Scott and Matthew Varey—got together to paint collaboratively for the first time in early 2005. We launched ourselves straightaway into the production of mixed media works on canvas that combined but, we felt, also transcended the sensibilities of the three of us. Despite three wildly different approaches to art-making and the presence of three well-nourished egos in contention, the group worked together from the beginning as if we had always been doing so.

We paint together, in the sense that all three artists work simultaneously on each canvas, drawing (with the brush and with anything else that falls to hand) and painting according to the dictates of what each thinks the painting requires. What is so satisfying to each artist - and essential, of course, for the well-being of every painting or drawing we make - is the degree to which all three enjoy the continual critique this process engenders: one makes a mark or a drawing or paints in a section or glues something onto the canvas; the other two look at what has happened and agree to leave it alone, modify it, embellish it, or simply paint over it.

The Iron Men work the way a think tank works: each suggestion is taken seriously, since there’s no way of knowing, no matter how initially unpromising any isolated painting moment may appear, where the new suggestion will ultimately lead.

What do we paint? The Iron Men surround and connect their images and ideas with passages of picture making which clearly stem from an unapologetic, hedonistically engendered love of painterliness. Images are often reinforced, underscored and amplified, however, by applications of text, and run from the archaic and archetypal to those incarnating the mythopoeics of our post-industrial culture, weaving them together into threnodies of celebration, warning, desire and despair. Many of the images recur to the point where we now stand at the beginning of assembling a sort of image-bank or image-frequency-list for the works: there are, in the paintings, vestiges of the epic journey (Odyssey/Iliad-derived ships, seas, distant horizons), isolated and displaced faces and figures, and a preoccupation with boundary, invasion, transgression, exploration and haven. There is a certain preoccupation in the paintings with the act of listening, both in the intimate personal sense and in the invasive technological sense. There are modes of travel, both intimate (airplanes, tanks) and stellar (space vehicles). There is a lot of journeying. And a certain amount of tentative arrival.

Where are the Iron Men going? As far as we can. We are journeymen, in all the senses of the word.