The title of my current exhibition, Bareback Baroque, is just a title, it is created to be provoking and encourage a discourse on ideas of what is natural, scary, beautiful and deceptive. The paintings I make are also about eliciting a visual/visceral response to these same ideas. My process is to layer. I create a carnal image, or an image of a domestic place and then cover it. The image is “decorated” either with references to the domestic space, or with “modern paint handling” gestures. My influences include modernists such as Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, as well as more contemporary artists such as David Reed, Ingrid Calame, Lari Pittman and James Rosenquist. The modern Pollack-like paint gestures are now succumbing to mainstream consumption and therefore becoming commonplace, thus making them equally decorative. In turn, what may be revealed in my work is a brassy kind of artifice, and it is in this artifice that I find meaning. You might call it camp, I see it as a duality of sincerity and irony. The work is revealing and concealing at the same time. I want my work to suggest space, while acknowledging its flat surface, to encourage the eye to wander in and out and over it’s surface.
As for my color palette, color functions in my work on multiple levels: Color serves as metaphor for personal tensions and alludes to Pop and psychedelic aesthetics. Color is used to be evasive and / or be deceptive. Color is also used in my work as an innate way to celebrating light and culture.
Ultimately, I want my paintings to be joyful, create tension, confound and draw from our sense of own body and mortality -- sublime.
David Lozano - 2010