Five on the First

August 2024
Kevin Lowenthal

“My practice investigates and re-evaluates the fibrous connections between cotton, oil paint, and other solvents as well as the psychological interplay of fractured consciousness and the eerie atmospheres of liminal interiors. Sometimes these spaces are inhabited by an audience of silhouetted mannequins and other times the viewer is asked to take their place. As an artist trained academically in many mediums, painting is the most decisive strike at questioning illusion. I’ve reached a wavering self-awareness in my work, inspecting and reworking this nebulous teetering between sculpture and painting; this cerebral and epistemological reckoning of my practice organically crystallizes as these neo-noir dreamspaces. They are the raw inventions mainly of my own line of questioning and a focused but unfettered selection of visual cues. Unsettling and acrimonious, doors, windows, stages, and curtains orchestrate this notion of passing and going, of breaking through thresholds, oscillating from one bounded space to another. What may initially seem unclear, hazy, or hollow is contrasted with the thick and earthly familiarity of touch and materiality; lost in this transient and transformative ground, the bedrock of my practice belongs.

Much of my practice has to do with forming an architectural dreamscape, a Lynchian-fantasy space where the notions of sculptural techniques and the verisimilitudes of painting have space to collide. The built-world and architecture around me, within and outside the studio, inform my internal worldbuilding. That translation morphs the studio into a sacred space where the canvases are portals -- phantom limbs of the studio itself.”

CV