What was your inspiration for the pieces in your recently opened New York exhibition, Palimpsests?
I did a painting in my Biennale di Venezia exhibition where I first painted a copy of [Italian master] Titian’s ‘Pietà’ and then I painted over the top of it with brush strokes that felt like water. I was making a connection between artists like Monet and Titian who, in spite of being active at different times, had elements and influences in common. The idea was not an art history lesson but that, at any given moment, multiple histories exist: yours, mine, nationalistic, artistic. This leads into what I jokingly call the mystery of history. As I stand in a specific place in Venice or sit in my chair here in SoHo [in Manhattan] and look around me there is no way I can know everything that brought me to this point. The buildings and people around me, my technology, my own DNA—it is not possible for me to know everything that lies beneath. I get glimpses and partial views but there is much mystery. In my new exhibition [including ‘Ramesses,’ 1], I have painted over older finished pairings I never meant to paint over, leaving glimpses as to what lies beneath, and I have followed my own history, leaving glimpses of my evolution.
You also have pieces commissioned for New York’s One World Trade Center lobby that feature your signature letters and literary references. What motivated that work?
At the time I was thinking of the letters as atoms or chromosomes, particulates that gather together to form a whole that can change and adapt. Letters being the basic building blocks of language and culture and civilization, I was thinking of building and creativity as a profound human endeavor.
The text for ‘Genesis’ is from the Book of Genesis. You cannot read any of the text; it has been atomized, and it was primarily focused on this idea of my faith in each new generation to build and create and add to their world. In the other two paintings [‘Randomly Placed Exact Percentages’ and ‘Isotropic,’ 2], the text is from Moby Dick. I used it because [Herman] Melville grew up and hung around lower Manhattan as a youth—it was his stomping ground. Plus it is a long book; lots of letters to mine.
Do the paintings have words that can be made out?
No, no words. It is interesting that in the history of writing, letters usually started out as pictures of the things. Our letter ‘A,’ for example, was turned slightly on its side with the feet up and was meant to represent an ox or a bull or something like that. I am just taking the letters and returning them to their pictorial roots.
If you weren’t a painter, what else would you be doing?
I have never been much interested in teaching art, but I do love the mind of a child. I would like to think I would have the patience and generosity required to teach children, but I suspect it would have been beyond me.
