Flesh Still life #1, Winter Squash and Apple
oil on panel
18"x20"
There is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. The flesh...is not a fact or a sum of facts “material or spiritual..." The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element” in the sense of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.
(Willem de Kooning)
Floating somewhere between cubism and surrealism, expressionism and abstraction, both Freudian and Rubenesque, the flesh paintings emerge from memories of meat dresses and mice with human ears, genetically modified fish-tomatoes, Soutine’s sides of beef, and my fascination with Membrane Theory, Body History, non-Euclidean Geometry, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notion of “the world as flesh”. At the same time, they are painted from life and take as their subject matter mundane objects from everyday existence, thus combining the ordinary with the esoteric. They echo our culture’s infatuation with all things bodily, from the obsession with health care to our morbid curiosity concerning pig farm murders, from rumours of human cloning to the proliferation of pornography, from plastic surgery to anorexia and obesity, from Victoria’s Secret to varicose veins. Indebted to Van Gogh’s shoes, Guston’s boots, Einstein’s Moon and Shroedinger’s Cat, the work is also about the paradoxical dual-singularity of objects-space, particle-wave, observer-observed, mind-body, and nature-culture, and the continuum between sense and non-sense, physics and phenomenology, animals and humans, procreation and poetry, and desire and disgust. Regarding viewer response, one of the first people ever to see Flesh Still life #1, Winter Squash and Apple said: “I don’t know if I like it but I can feel it.”
Mark Laver