On the Rise:
Curators Recommend

Trevor Richardson for
New American Paintings
2008

The search for an art that maps the uneasy encroachment of  industrial and urban culture onto open landscapes, was a major preoccupation of artists during the twentieth century. Today, many artists continue to look to landscape for components of meaning, signs that serve as symptoms, or more broadly as archetypal models, of the larger patterns of change in the modern world. For many artists, the challenge continues to lie in making images that address the myths of landscape in ways that are relevant to contemporary experience. What they seek  is a new orientation to the subject of nature, one that is tied to the cycles of contemporary life. 

Something like this impulse can be found in the work of the Brooklyn-based painter Dean Monogenis.  His images of buildings or architectural structures do not function as symbols of something else, but are exemplary of the adaptions and re-use which constitutes the history of the urban environment. His imagery is not a program to be decoded iconographically by reference to a set of prior meanings. What we are offered instead, are scenic spaces which simulate, by the abundance of images and their connectivity, the relation to the world that we have in terms of moving about a city, experiencing its flowing and continuous treasury of common objects and signs.  In a recent painting entitled "Surrender" (2007), Monogenis seems more concerned with a standoff between sign and image, than with a reconciliation of opposites in the context of art. Here, the pleasure lies in the use of signs in a context that can be resolved neither by recourse to the referent (something in the world) nor by purely visual enjoyment of the colors and autonomous paint marks (something in the painting). The architectural structure in the background provides a focal point while offering commentary and narrative shading, and the foreground comprised of broad swathes of  color and vertical patterning, serves as the compositional foundation for the picture.  By means of this carefully articulated control over the relationship of the scene's reality and his own creative choices of depiction, Monogenis reminds us that painting is fundamentally more about ideals of culture and not, finally, about perfections in nature or chance occurrences. His images are elegant visual constructs that succeed in the difficult task of achieving the requisite subordination of detail to the overall pictorial idea. They exude a certain pictorial romanticism, yet they remain fundamentally contemporary in spirit, and never shirk the traditional obligation of landscape painting to be both a window to the urban world and a persuasive metaphor for its expression.