painting with thirty pieces of silver

“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”

“A component, like a capacitor?” *

A capacitor stores a charge in an electrical field. It might be subject to resistance, crossed wires, open circuit; signals are lost. There could be a residual spark in the system. This is a pre-digital painting. It didn’t anticipate its future as a google-able image. I don’t think it considered itself as image at all and it barely holds together as painting. It is a makeshift, improvisational structure something like a vernacular circuit board cobbled together from discarded pieces. It is a washed-up, wasteland assembly of hard and soft structures, trying to find a position somewhere against the vast wave of commodification about to break all over the new decade that was the ‘90s.

*William Gibson Count Zero 1986

Painting in the RCA Collection, currently up in the SCR I hear

Doctrine of similarity?