Head Count opens September 6 and runs through October 18, 2025.​

​

Artist Statement - Chris Taylor

​​

I think of myself primarily as an abstract painter. In my “Front” series I’m using a simplified portrait format to continue the explorations of pictorial space that I’ve been focused on for years in my abstract work. The person in these paintings (based on myself) is facing backwards. Oriented in this way, it’s an anonymous and fairly generic human form that I can treat as just one set of shapes and colors among others. The head, neck, and shirt of the person join with clouds, stripes, and x-shapes to create complex illusions of depth and volume in some parts of the paintings, and to assert the actual flatness of the painting surface in other parts. However, an image of a person facing away from the viewer adds an interesting social/emotional element to these visual and material investigations. Such images can be psychologically unsettling—even when the representation of the person is as minimal as these are. It’s as if the person in the painting is shunning or concealing themselves from the viewer, which closes the painting off from the viewer.*This contrasts with the openness that I typically associate with abstraction. That is, abstraction to me is an art form of self-exhibition, of laying bare or revealing what paintings are and how they work.** Looked at this way, there’s a tension in these works between concealing and revealing that I find deeply compelling, and it points me towards new possibilities for making and thinking about paintings.

​

Notes on the work

​

*There are more ways to understand images like this. To begin with, shunning and concealing are really two different acts, and the viewer will feel differently depending on which of these interpretations they lean towards in front of the paintings. In addition to shunning and concealing, it might seem as though the person in the painting is mimicking the position and orientation of the viewer, looking in the same direction that the viewer is, thus identifying with/as the viewer. There are numerous examples of this throughout art history, and the effect is often to make the viewer feel as though they’re part of the scene or action depicted in the painting. John McCutcheon, owner of the Sean Christopher Gallery, suggested another very interesting reading related to this one. He associated these images with the direction Catholic priests faced when saying mass prior to Vatican II in the 1960s. They faced east, just as the congregation did, which meant they had their backs to the congregation. (The term for this practice is, “ad orientem”.) This suggested that the priests were leading the congregants in their worship of God. It implied further that the experience of God for the faithful had to pass through and be mediated by the priest. The priests turned around and faced the congregants in the 60s as a way of creating a more intimate connection with them, in keeping with the liberalization of the Church at that time. Though I no longer practice the faith, I was raised Catholic, so this interpretation resonates with me.

 

**I want to say a bit more about painting and “facing.” Paintings face us. That is such a fundamental and obvious fact about the medium that we never think about it or notice it when viewing paintings. Of course they face us, and they address us, showing something to us. I think this is why I find it so jarring to look at an image of a person facing away from me. It suddenly makes me aware of that “fundamental and obvious fact” about painting—because it challenges it—and in making me aware, it makes that fact meaningful to my experience of painting. This is how I understand what is broadly called Modernist painting, and abstract painting in particular. Abstract painting—including the work of Kandinsky, Pollock, Rothko, Frankenthaller, Stella, etc—is said to have asserted the flatness of painting. But, what does this mean? Conventional paintings had been flat for centuries—Leonardo, Caravaggio, Delacroix, Monet, Van Gogh…flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. Again, it was a fundamental and obvious fact about the medium. So what did abstraction do that was so special? It made flatness significant, meaningful, essential. It didn’t discover flatness in the usual sense of discovery. It made it count as—or recognized it as—a crucial feature of the medium.

​

A word on the title of the series

 

“Front” as a noun signifies a forward part of something and also a disguise, or a feigned appearance. Somewhat relatedly, front refers to boundaries in military conflicts and in the weather.

​

As a verb, front means to serve as a cover for something or someone, and to assume a fake or false personality to conceal one's true identity and character. It also means to supply a front to, as in an architectural structure.

​

So that single word, “front,” can mean the face of something, and in that sense it’s associated with exposure or revelation, and it can mean to conceal one’s true identity. Again: revelation and concealment.​

​