“In that devastating, delirious moment when the momentum of emotions catches up to the destiny of their consequences, when the proverbial tires hit the road and the rub attains a velocity that chafes pleasure, the sensory subsumes the rational and everything becomes a bit of a blur.
Ecstatic or traumatic, it hardly matters, for such an instant is always ultimately about nothing more than the loss of self to the imperative of situation.
In the stretching of beauty beyond its anatomical frame, the scarring of the visual plane with the incendiary violence of vice, the hurling of surrogate sexuality against the certainty of futility, or simply the fathoming of our terror in the shadows of our uncertainty, Erik Foss conjures the uncanny blur of events as a kind of fetishist abstraction.
Creating conceptually driven action paintings in which the impact of obsession fractures the figurative and narrative alike, Foss maps psychological distortions as visceral facts with the forensic acuity of a visionary deviant. ”
-Carlo McCormick
Erik Foss (American) mines pop culture to create his layered works. His paintings and collages incorporate images that spur the viewer’s nostalgia or their melancholia, but in ways that contort the memories they evoke and thus the reception of his works: in one beloved Bugs Bunny takes a tab of acid, in another photographs of Albert Einstein and the Obamas are layered into a chaotic collage alongside images of women’s bodies and dripping paint reminiscent of graffiti. Erik’s works ask us to examine the uncomfortable underbelly of popular culture and consumerism.