Sofia Coppola is the curator for the current Mapplethorpe showing at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris. Ooo-La-La!

The art world is of no concern for an artist. What I do is make art, that art is abstract. I have no feelings about the place of abstract art. It is something that I am driven to do, so I am out there doing it. It is not a choice. I cannot state exactly what it is that I am doing, or chasing, which is in itself is something that I love about seeing the world this way. There is an elusive and mysterious quality to the process and try as I might to tie it down, it changes right in front of me. Therein lays the chase.

It is my goal to be evocative but vague. Since the work is non-representational titles are somewhat irrelevant. Yet they can certainly make or break a piece as you have said. Language carries with it countless implications and ideas and I do not want to influence the viewer’s interpretation with insignificant language which could act as distraction from what it is that I am attempting to convey.

Tell you the truth I have been somewhat withdrawn from the world of art and been holed up in the studio for quite a while now. As a result I am not very aware about the happenings in the art world at the moment. There are some people whose work has caught my eye; Wolf Kahn, Judy Pfaff, Andy Goldsworthy, Tahiti Pehrson, Janet Drever, to name few.

My life has been shaped, as is everyone’s, by my experiences. I have lived in many places, both domestic and abroad. My first memories are of living in Bahrain and then Saudi Arabia. The impressions left on me through being in such a place played an enormous role in my developments as an individual and artist. In Islamic religious art, which is everywhere in Saudi, geometric designs and patterns are the only depictions of God and other sacred concepts. There are no representations of the “face” of God or anything else other than geometric designs. Looking back on this now I can see how profound of an effect it had on my developing creative spirit. A few years later, after my family had moved to the States, I went through a period where I became somewhat obsessed with geometric shapes. I would burn through stacks of paper with pen and ruler trying to make these three dimensional looking stars constructed of “perfectly” straight and even lines, with very little success I recall. My Mom was not too happy about the paper consumption. But I had a need to do it, I was working something out.

The power this all had over shaping my design sensibility was such that I saw how it was possible to convey meaning and, greater than that, metaphysics by way of a visual language which was not rooted in a realm of literal form. I have long since shed the use of symmetry, “perfection” and literal geometry to employ these tools in a freer more intuitive way, in search of those sacred elements which reside in and on space and plane. At the Guggenheim with my school when I was about 10, I saw my first abstract expressionist work in person. I was blown away. It was a huge moment for me, and I can remember thinking to myself, “I want to do this”.

More often than not my palette is a product of intuition. I do not really plan my paintings, when I do it goes horribly wrong, so color is something that just sort of appears on the canvas according to the moment. If it works, that’s great, if not, it serves to add a sense of history to the canvas which is something that intrigues me and is a definite part of the process. Sort of like collecting stamps in a passport. This idea of the canvas having a sense of story or depth due to accumulation and gradual addition and subtraction of color holds a great deal of interest to me.

There is something transcendent about standing in front of and working on a large painting that allows one to be consumed by the work. It is a glimpse into something that is seldom felt. A moment of moksha.

Well, first and foremost I stretch the canvas. I enjoy this construction phase. It allows for a connection to the substrate to be formed which fosters a love, or sometimes, hate, relationship. Conception is often shaped by the very first marks on the canvas. I follow this path and see where the marks take me. What I am looking for is some kind of rhythm; I want the colors to lay next one another and have a kind of conversation with one another. Lately I have been experimenting with washes and thinner builds, on top of which I might add thicker paint in certain areas at the end. Painting like this seems to be a little more strategic as there is a minimal use of color and thusly the use of color and ways in which these colors are applied is of greater significance.

She has definitely flexed some muscle and exerted some regularity onto my studio life and creative life. I can work at home, drawings, stuff like that, but most of my work is done at the studio and it has been good to have more consistent work hours there. As a parent I am a more patient man now. I can see that patience in the way I work now. There is a calmness that wasn’t there before which is something I had not expected.

I would expect there to be some comparisons made. I am taking their lead in something that has more to offer than just a fleeting fad. That group of artists pioneered something wonderful. The differences, though, are in the theory and more simply the application of paint itself. As a movement, they were moving away from form and depth and toward an idea of the super-flat. They were abstracting cubism, which was already flattening form, and taken that much further by removing subject and object to work only with color and application technique. I am concerned with flatness only in how it might serve as counterpoint to the deeper fields in other areas on the picture plane. I see it as implied flatness with an allusion to depth.

Moving here was pretty shocking at first. We are in the mountains of the far northeast corner of Idaho, and the west entrance to Yellowstone park is only forty minutes from us. The town has a population of 215. I am sure this is the smallest town I will ever live in. The owner of a local restaurant was attacked by a grizzly last week, he is doing well, and we see a lot of moose and foxes. Our house is right on a very large reservoir so summertime is full of water activities. Winter is long, last year we had about twelve and a half feet of snow all said and done, and there were patches of snow lying around in late June. So winter is a good time to be working in the studio. You get pretty tired of seeing white.

It can be difficult sometimes to reign in tendencies, and control the flow in an attempt to seek out balance. Remaining true to your convictions is a frequent test, but that is perhaps the most important factor. I often find myself in a predicament where I am feeling overwhelmed, like I have lost it. Those are the special moments where we define ourselves. Problem solving skills and perseverance are not to be taken for granted.

The triumphs are the flip side of those struggles. Finding myself in that fog and emerging from it a better, smarter, painter with a keener insight to myself. Quitting a work at just the right moment is a feeling that holds a special place.

I think that collaborations can be very exciting and interesting. Obviously who one is working with makes all the difference. Project Runway shows that very well. I have no aversion to trying one, although I do feel that some kind of plan going into the work would be a necessity. I think that I would like to do one with an artist who works in realism, to see the juxtapositions working against and with one another could be cool.

I still work in those areas as well, not so much still life. Living where I live it is impossible not to work from the landscape sometimes. I feel that all of these forms relate to one another and it is up to us to see that. There are techniques one can take from one discipline and use in the other with great success. And in all truth it is the failures we learn from. I am all about trying new things out with paint and other media, I love that experimentation. That is an exciting thing, to get lost in the qualities of the medium and move forward with a sense of abandon.

We have a lot of ravens up here. They are called dumpster chickens by the locals. Despite the unflattering term, I think I would choose a raven. They are unusual animals and they have a lot of unique qualities. They represent the trickster in the mythology of more than one culture. That says a lot about a creature.

One reason the grotesque is so compelling is its ravaged beauty. Bound up in the distorting horror, at least in art, is an absurdity that also makes its appearance rather comic. All of those elements are in play in David Altmejd’s dazzling new show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, where decapitated heads grow glittering crystals, fossilized angels are crucified within the walls, and agglomerations of human ears ornament plexiglass cages swarming with jewel-like, plastic bees.

As a mediator of the sacred and the profane, Altmejd makes every object a thing of beauty, the driving force of his work. “For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty,” he said the other day. “Things that are pure, I can’t feel them. They have to be infected or else they don’t exist — they don’t have a presence.” There’s no shortage of charisma in this show. Just inside the gallery entrance is the plaster figure of a man with a big hole where the heart should be — apparently a self-inflicted wound. It gets your attention right away. Hands tear at the figure’s ribs and rest beside a ridiculously small skull atop shoulders embedded with the incongruous ears. Its flying, winglike appendages give it the look of the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace, the goddess that once adorned the prow of an ancient Greek ship.

“I like holes,” Altmejd said. “I like orifices. They’re what lets in light and air.” His inorganic organisms definitely seem to breathe. “The Vessel,” a 20-foot-long plexiglass diorama of disembodied hands and noses, fairly shimmers in the gallery’s main exhibition space. It features a pair of flayed, swanlike plaster arms, their hands clasping bird beaks of a particularly phallic shape. A kind of Greek chorus of raised fists grasping more beaks surrounds them, all trapped in a rigging of cascading colored threads set off by plantlike crystals.

For Altmejd, who is 36 and once thought he would be a biologist, the strings represent the blood vessels of a circulatory system connecting the parts to the whole, though the work’s confounding transparency makes it impossible to take in at a single glance, or even many. The picture changes with every blink. Just as difficult to comprehend, though no less fascinating, is “The Swarm,” a companion piece of the same size. Instead of hands, it contains swooping vectors of the plastic bees, each wrapped in fine gold chain. Strings of ears also dangle within, while large blank ants crawl up the sides of the container — clearly a metaphor for a conflicted body that is sprouting plaster heads coiffed in ridiculous toupees.

The ears are new to Altmejd’s work, which usually proliferates with casts of just his hands. “Ears are softer,” he said, “like butterfly wings. They’re sort of pretty, though they’re also kind of gross.” While “The Vessel” seems ordered and symmetrical, “The Swarm” presents a cosmos of chaos within the natural world. Presiding over their gothic splendor is an abject plaster angel embedded high on one wall; multiple hands tear at its ribs, ripping itself apart. The sight of it reminded me of the scene in “Silence of the Lambs” in which Hannibal Lecter strings up a victim like a butterfly or a kite. Altmejd’s is both tragic and saintly, a martyr punishing itself for its narcissism with extreme self-loathing. Its Christ-like appearance is deliberate. “I’ve really been into Catholic visuals in the past few years,” Altmejd told me. Not that he’s religious. “I just like the metaphors and the imagery,” he said.

A similar figure spreads its tentacle-like wings across three walls of a rear gallery, as if to embrace the quartz crystals on display in a plexiglass case at the center of the room. Crystals have been a recurring element of Altmejd’s work since his first shows in 2002, when they decorated the werewolf cadavers he laid out in modernist sarcophagi. Later, they gave the hairy giants for which he is best known the look of fetishistic dandies. In this show, they jut from the decayed cheeks of plaster-flocked heads that lie in two corners of the gallery, as if they had rolled off the giants and mutated into life forms yet to be identified. I couldn’t help but wonder if Altmejd was subject to bad dreams. “I do have nightmares,” he admitted. “They’re very sophisticated, but they don’t look like my work at all.”

-LINDA YABLONSKY

Joshua Hagler is a friend here at RefractionART, whom we interviewed back in October for his show in NYC. You can check that out by clicking here: Intense Personal Narrative.

He recently did some work in Italy, and has an upcoming show in Miami. Please check his website for more information: www.joshuahagler.com

Stay tuned for a more in-depth look and possible Q & A regarding Joshua’s new work.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog’s first year. We are now mumbling semi-intelligble words, and will be eating solid foods before long…

Lots of exciting things are planned for 2012. Stay tuned.