NYAB Event - Eric Banks "New Work"

Eric Banks "New Work"

Amos Eno Gallery

This event has ended.

These works executed over the past 3-4 years reflect my continuing effort to deal with the complexities of painting. My work is not easily categorized as abstract or representational. Its subject is neither literal nor illustrative but rather one rooted in subconscious associations. I grapple with the multiple ambiguities that exist between the suggestion of recognizable or depicted form, the materiality of the medium, and the metaphysical capacities and paradoxical relationships of space (macrocosm, microcosm, distance, and propinquity). I do not proliferate imagery, nor am I concerned with appropriation of styles or linkage with periods or movements. Equally, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the often melodramatic and/or heroic, (existential, tragic, working class hero, romantic rebel etc.) typifications of artists and their “temperaments”. For me painting is kind of like an act of faith, a plunge into the mind/heart/soul hiatus, an attempt to draw from within the subconscious a pictorial equivalency for thought and emotion. The art that I am interested in communicates at a somewhat primal, elemental, and thus universal level.

What engages a painting for me is when the material and the illusion achieve a oneness; a synchronicity of feeling and purpose. It is as difficult to really describe in words as it would be to illustrate the meaning of a poem in pictorial form (or even in other words). I realize it is considered somewhat archaic but my tendency is towards a spiritual and as such indefinable realm; one not trivialized by a vaporous ethereality or reliant on the presumptions of an enchanted entranced mysticism. It is perhaps a distillation or more an aggregation of essence and “meaning” that I feel both the creator and the audience derives from the experience of a work of art. This is something experienced at a particular level of intuition and mental activity affective on psychological, philosophical, and poetic aspects of human consciousness.