William Talenti

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them.”
-Albert Camus

These six paintings (in the exhibit) concern pigment application and idea combination. I began each piece with a deliberate modality—Realistic, Abstract, or Non-Objective—pairing each with a “sister” painting on an opposing wall to serve as a formal counterpoint. Eventually, the rules dissolved, and I stopped following the recipe. An overlapping of my emotional state and the evolving surface of the paint occurred, allowing the content to find its own voice beyond the initial structure.

Direct/Indirect represents a deliberate unlearning of over thirty years of visual literacy. As both an educator and a painter, I am fascinated by how a personal artistic voice is constructed, refined, and—eventually—dismantled. By isolating the core elements of color, shape, value, and pattern, I converge figurative representation with the intuitive faculty of abstraction. These works seek the tension between what we see and how we think, emptying the familiar to discover what remains.

-William Talenti