Kandyskin Chronicle

The eleven large oil paintings and texts that make up the single work titled the Kandyskin Chronicle were conceived and executed between 1988 and 1990, during the latter half of a ten-year long residence in the city.  These paintings are the result of a long meditation on the history of the avant-garde movements in painting in the first half of the 20th Century, and chronicle the growing importance (dominant by now) of the role of the critic/curator (access to mass-media), gallery owner and collector (market). 

Painting itself, the chromatic skin stretched on the canvas by the painter, is personified as Kandyskin, at once a pun on Kandinsky (father of abstractism) and Candide, Voltaire’s much exploited but eternally optimistic hero.  After the initial auction scene (Striped), Kandyskin undergoes an unspecified number of metamorphoses and in the last painting (The Lasting Supper), she is present as Anna Livia Plurabelle in the role of Isis, gathering up the crumbs.  As  Harold Rosenberg pointed out in The Anxious Object, “Released from place, and the traditional, sensual and political ties imposed by place, art tends to derive increasingly from experiences of art.”

This work is dedicated to Harold Rosenberg, who kindly allowed me as a graduate student to audit his course on the 20th Century Avant-garde Movements in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.  It is also dedicated, for the obvious stylistic inspiration of the texts, to James Joyce.