Terry Thacker: Artist Statement

Abstract painting today must be aware of the necessary conditions of ambivalence and mournfulness in Late Modernism and in painting generally. Broadly, painting becomes a confrontation of both fundamentalism and doubt and not a means to stylistic autonomy or refinement, although form is decisively deployed. As with any substantial conversation within history, painting attempts to recover from its past useful propositions and jettison failed ones. These paintings are poetic, lovely, and metaphoric, a propositional zone where Early Modernist’s evangelical rhetoric concedes to vulgar, lyrical particularities, but not without the pathos that is always associated with the frailty of our ambivalent experiences and fragile, fictive histories. Mannerism, decoration, illusionism, allegorical impulses, eroticism, and formal eccentricities wound Greenberg, but they also restore certain conditions that were always latent in abstraction and necessary for living today.