Dan Colen

The deconstruction of an artwork’s creation, and the investigation of the meaning imbued in its raw material, has also led Colen to use unconventional materials. This gradual process—the breaking down of the brushstroke and the very elements of the artist’s mark—was extended with the visceral, abstract Bubblegum Paintings (2006–). Made of actual bubblegum instead of paint, these works correspond in some ways to the questions of painting and historical representation that Colen himself seems to ask with oil painting. Grappling with materials over long stretches of time, within each series, he challenges their distinct formal qualities again and again. Chosen for their immediacy and their remoteness from contemporary art discourse, the substances—from chewing gum to street trash—override assumptions about the essence of painting. Brash yet fragile, the Flower Paintings contain Colen’s accumulated impressions from the last six years, not unlike the traditional Daoist landscape painter who must wander through the mountains in order to depict his topography. This series is the culmination of a pivotal phase in Colen’s career as a groundbreaking American painter.

With the Flower Paintings, Colen relinquishes control of the painterly mark and turns the action of the brushstroke into a smashing or shattering gesture. Instead of paint, natural seasonal and artificially dyed flowers from corner bodegas and markets in New York City were employed to mark the canvas, applied with quotidian objects—rubber mallets, dildos, bowling pins, and billiard balls—rather than paintbrushes. Gradually the flower marks began to smear from the flowers being dragged and pressed into the loose canvas. Residual petals and pistils, adhered by Colen’s own pressure, are reminders that these works exist in the physical, as well as metaphysical, world. The Flower Paintings demonstrate both Colen’s persistent confrontation with and his surrender to the limitations of painting. The aesthetic impressions are created by measures of force, rather than by the considered or impassioned painterly gesture. In these paintings, Colen has collapsed the distance between subject and object, the represented and the representative—the image of the flower, made by the flower—in his ongoing quest for what lies at the heart of the act of artistic transformation.