Untitled 2018

Curator: This piece, entitled "Untitled," was created in 2018 using acrylic paint. What are your first thoughts? Editor: It’s unsettling, even nightmarish. The crudeness of the strokes amplifies a palpable sense of unease and emotional tension. Curator: Observe the composition. The foreground teems with lurid purple and green vegetation, a visual counterpoint to the cool blues and purples in the arboreal background. This layering contributes to the picture's peculiar depth. Editor: Yes, but it's the central symbols that grab me. Fire often represents destruction, but also purification and transformation. To see a piano engulfed...it speaks to the destruction of beauty, the loss of melody, and the death of artistic creation. And then you have that stoic figure... Curator: He seems detached. The artist positions this rather unflattering figure in an extremely awkward place and pose. We may regard this composition using structruralist concepts that demonstrate binary opposites of construction and deconstruction, the cold versus the warm, to form meaning. Editor: True. But this figure, positioned in the frame, almost as if unaffected by the scene playing out before him. His gaze is unreadable, isn't it? Does he embody indifference, resignation, or perhaps something darker, like complicity in this act of destruction? Perhaps its about ego and unfulfilled potential. Curator: I'm not certain it goes quite that far; you can decode semiotic meaning as it functions, a piano on fire doesn't automatically make me thing of destruction or the human psyche in pain, rather a juxtaposition. I read an awkward portrait composed through careful artistic intention. The materiality itself doesn’t betray such concepts as sorrow or fear. Editor: Perhaps it doesn’t, but I can’t divorce the images from their potential to evoke emotions, cultural memory, and layered narratives. In looking I sense trauma and something inherently troubling is occurring. Curator: Well, there's always that opportunity when engaging with works of art such as these. What one discovers through careful viewing of composition and meaning behinds forms and symbology! Editor: Agreed! And for the observer of contemporary art as street art, I suppose the real meaning lies within.