Life+Times Presents: Dan Colen, A Retrospective

“Studs”

“These works are about a lot of things: meditation, repetition, rhythms, geometry, punk rockers, teeny boppers, attitude, style, high fashion, dirty streets, painting, sculpture, the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and right now. They’re about innovators and posers. They’re even about Yiddish. And they may be about me locating myself within all that information. But mostly, as with the motorcycles, they are about things falling apart, and whether that degradation can give way to creation. These works are about control and the impossibility of control. To make a stud painting is to try to keep the grid tight, but it inevitably unravels. Order falls into chaos, and that disorder will repeat itself until the canvas is covered or, in the case of my own existence, until I’m dead.”