T.L. Solien: Innocence Transfigured
Fassbender Gallery, Chicago
October 20 - November 25, 2000
Fassbender Gallery presents Innocence Transfigured, a new body of work by Midwestern painter T.L. Solien. Here, the artist continues his investigation of the inner life of self-portraiture. While employing Pop imagery as a starting point, Solien as an artist is almost impossible to pin down. He borrows and incorporates influences from all spheres of his life experience and knowledge. Utilizing compositional techniques from classic portraiture, Solien's 'sitters' nonetheless transgress all rules of decorum. Starting off as light-hearted, almost vacuous Pop characters from advertising and cartoons, they quickly veer off into the realm of the macabre. They transmogrify before our very eyes from cute and cuddly girls and puppies into horned goats and cursed wraiths. More than this, the flesh and substance of these characters has a tendency to melt and vaporize into pure brushwork and painted surface. Solien obliterates and overpaints until the space of his picture planes becomes claustrophobic and unhealthy.
Throughout all this, however, T.L. Solien retains his sense of humor and wonder at all that life brings his way. Admittedly autobiographical in his output, the artist presents grave situations, but in ambiguous and universal fashion. Despite mystical and paganistic titles and vertiginous, kaleidoscopic settings, these paintings address normal middle class life in Middle America in the present day. They hold up the artist's life as an example of the soap opera we are all living. With a cast of characters that frequently resurface and, no doubt, represent specific people in the life of the artist, these artworks are strangely familiar. They are classic examples of the power of satire to instruct and draw us all together.
FASSBENDER GALLERY
835 W. Washington, Chicago, IL 60607
www.fassbendergallery.com
