Shuffle Paintings (2006 - present)

This ongoing series of painting was originally inspired by the shuffle feature on my old iPod back in 2006. I was (and still am) interested in the concept of random aesthetics. What happen when you deliberately remove conscious aesthetic decisions from an artwork?

Each painting in the first iteration of this series consisted of a square, checkered grid of four by four colors completely chosen at random. Each color was repeated four times and had the opportunity to touch each of the other three colors on several sides. The colors were selected from the complete library of acrylic paints produced by Golden Artist Colors, and included fluorescent, metallic, and iridescent colors painted on thin archival masonite panels, a homage to Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. The walls on which these paintings are installed are also sometimes painted colors chosen at random. To make matters more complex, later paintings in this series contained further, smaller Shuffle paintings placed within them, also created at random. The smaller Shuffles sometimes related to the color composition of the larger, surrounding paintings and sometimes not.

In 2010, for my first exhibition of this series at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery in Miami, Florida, I made a suite of Shuffle paintings directly inspired by the legendary salsa ensemble Fania All Stars. Each painting paid homage to a specific musician in the group, including Johnny Pacheco, Hector Lavoe, Celia Cruz, Ray Barretto, and Larry Harlow, among others. Depending on the specific make-up of the ensemble’s members at any given moment, the sound changed dramatically.

Several years later in 2014, I made another suite of petite Shuffle paintings for a two-person exhibition at Dr. Julius AP in Berlin, Germany, which were titled after the pseudonyms used by Modern and Contemporary artists I admire: Blinky Palermo, Judy Chicago, R. Mutt, James Kalm, etc. These paintings were also an attempt to see if an intense color experience could happen on a minute scale. I believe it can, of course. This strategy is the inverse of traditional color abstraction / field painting, which is generally very large and immersive in scale.