Kristopher Lionel

The first piece in my series, 'Surfaces', is a work titled, 'The Moment Ossified (Surface 1)'. To talk about this piece, and the resulting series, I need to provide the backdrop, the setting that led to it's conception. After receiving my Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in 1994, then going on to attain my Master of Fine Art Degree in 1997, both with concentrations in sculpture, I was offered a job working in a metal fabrication studio in Atlanta, GA. After a couple of years of this, I decided that it wasn't satisfying my creative compulsions, so I moved back the the Northeast to start an artisan/art furniture design and fabrication business (a "commercial" use of my skills with the ulterior motive of "working on my art" in the space and with the tools and equipment used to build the furniture). Part of setting up my workshop was to build a large table as a main working surface, the base of this table had a 1/2 inch (removable) sheet of plywood screwed to it as a top. I made it removable knowing that it would take a lot of wear and tear and eventually need to be replaced.

A number of years later, as I was looking at this worktable that had accumulated several years of cuts, scratches, holes, and stains, I saw shapes and lines suggesting a strong composition and realized that it was calling out to be made into a work of art, a wall sculpture. With paint and stain I began to emphasize selected shapes and obscure others. After working on it laid flat for a time (often looking down from atop an eight foot ladder), I separated it from its base and worked on it upright, cutting through it and making the recessed shapes you see in the finished piece. Working through the process of discovering and creating this piece, I decided that "Surface" (thought of as both noun and verb) was how I would name it. Years of building furniture on this work-surface resulted in a rich, uncontrived, accumulation of mark that would be difficult, if not impossible to mimic or reproduce. These marks eventually surfaced to reveal the composition of an artwork. 'Surface' is both what it is and how it came to be.

* A note about the series, 'Surfaces':

The process described above, in which the accumulation of mark resulted from making furniture, ended when I decided that furniture making wasn't satisfying my creative compulsions and closed my business to focus singularly on my artwork. The lines and marks, etc, in 'Dissociating and Tumbling (Surface 4)', and all 'Surfaces' moving forward, were/are accumulated from my art-making process.

Outgrowths (From Veiled Surface Iterations)

While the works shown here are derived predominately from my series 'Veiled Surface Iterations' they diverge in significant enough ways to warrant being grouped together as "outgrowths". They are the result of experimentation, of cross-pollination between ideas and other series. These pieces are a turn in the road, the intersection where my work heads in new directions. The description for each piece details how it has veered away from the series 'Veiled Surface Iterations'.

'The Happy War' is about humanity's self-driven, self-reinforced separation from Nature. Each painting is a "page" in a surrealistic allegory. The works in this ongoing series satirize the concept that human beings, above all other living things, are most significant in the universe; they depict the consequences of this belief. Through symbolism, 'The Happy War' portrays a nightmarish, barren, world in which this mindset holds sway. Like the piece, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', painted by the early Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch between 1490 and 1510, 'The Happy War' sets forth to communicate a moral. While there's little agreement as to the exact meaning of this Bosch painting, it has often been interpreted to mean that "sins of the flesh" will result in humanity's fall from grace, our damnation. 'The Happy War' is about humanity's transgressions ("sins") against Nature and the resulting hellscape we will condemn ourselves and future generations to live in following the collapse of ecosystems driven by an increasingly unstable climate as a consequence of global warming. In answer to the onslaught of disinformation we've seen in recent years, 'The Happy War' illustrates humanities fall from reason. Aspects of Christianity and technology, and right wing ideologies, responsible for reinforcing and entrenching the belief that humanity is separate and above all other living things, are wickedly derided in 'The Happy War'. Through a mixture of obscure symbols, like monkey-angels and pig-demons, and others more familiar, like crosses and canaries, which I've selected from popular culture, all representing vices, follies, faults, abuses, and atrocities, this fitful, episodic narrative traverses a landscape of absurdism.

Representing the idea of humanity's self-importance, the senselessly destructive culmination of our ingenious technologies, is a symbol of futility embodied by the human figure seen fitted with a mechanical, wheeled prosthetic. Hugh Hubris is the name I've given this legless figure mounted to a machine that it cranks to turn endless circles around a fixed, immovable block ('so to better survey the breadth of its domain'). This sad, spinning figure symbolizes functioning futility, it represents humanity's self-limiting conceit and the destructive consequences. It was once generally believed that the Sun orbited around the Earth only to eventually be bravely disproved by science. Hugh Hubris, who is so arrogant that he made certain he could only revolve around himself, stands as a reminder of human egoism. 'The Happy War' is my rebuttal to a worldview that seeks to subjugate Nature to human will, to consume it without consideration of the consequences. The story on each "page" of 'The Happy War' unfolds above a scorched, arid landscape devoid of life, a consequence of our attitude toward and treatment of Nature.

Gabriel and his fellow monkey-angles fly through themes of morality, religion, politics, technological ascent, and environmental collapse, as they wage a war against forces that would see their destruction. Theirs is a fight for survival, for life, for happiness. Their fight is our fight, let's hope they win.

'Dots and Ethereal Structures', are a grouping of related works in which I approached painting as sculpture. In painting, it's conventionally accepted that paint and other mediums are applied directly to the surface of a work. As a sculptor, with a sculptor's a point of view, I was interested in taking a different tack. I decided to apply paint not just to the surface of the work, but also to physically place/float color and shape in front of the surface; I achieved this by insetting pigmented epoxy into heavy clear-coats of catalyzed epoxy finish.

Color, atmospheric effect, perspective, and material use, were employed throughout this series to find visual tensions that are created when that which is physically real and tangible is juxtaposed with the imaginary, and illusory. The pieces from and Ethereal Structures' are about how space and depth (both real and fictitious), as well as visual movement and energy (achieved through color and perspective), combine to create expressive works.

To create visual vibrations, saturated colors were placed on and in front of colors that are, or approach, their compliments. These seemingly “vibrating” colors, where the edges of two directly adjacent colors appear to merge, blur and glow, giving the illusion of motion, is a phenomena that occurs with the use of bold and highly saturated color schemes (especially when the colors are compliments).

Dots and perspective line drawings were set into clear epoxy coats where they float in front of atmospheric fields of color to create the illusion of space, of three-dimensional structures suspended in air. A close look will reveal that these dots and drawings cast actual, real shadows onto the surfaces behind them.

The works from and Ethereal Structures' were informed by Abstract Expressionism. The pieces in this grouping are not rooted in, nor do they mirror, translate, or represent, objective reality. Free from objective subject, color, line, atmosphere, perspective and material were used for aesthetic reasons, to create visually compelling, evocative artworks.