Shawn
Watrous
Shawn
Watrous' new body of work leaps forward reaching into
the internal experience and pulls from memory, creating
a myth of the self, a kind of recreation of historical
identity. Merging abstraction with representational
forms, Watrous wishes to express memory as a hyper-reality,
mystical and dreamlike. There is a renaming of personal
reality taking place with the work, a desire to make
peace with the past by pulling the past into the process
of creation. Watrous is taking that by which is sacred
to himself and recreating it within a pictorial space
bringing forth a kind of relic that suggests a narrative
that is his personal identity. The paintings are part
of a quest, the unearthing of the self in an attempt
to find the self and an attempt to find god.
Watrous paints to convey the unreal nature of our
perceived visual reality. The nature of our visual
experience is subject to the filter of our perception.
We use words to create pictures that describe our
perceived experience. The limitations of words, of
language, are made evident when an attempt is made
to use words to express intuitive awareness, spiritual
perception, and anything beyond what we perceive to
be our physical reality. Our physical reality is neither
as clear nor as solid as we might initially think.
Everyday objects, when taken out of the context of
the words we use to describe them and considered from
an entirely visual standpoint, slip easily into the
realm of the unreal. Objects are made subject to light,
atmosphere and imagination. What we understood as
a named object, a chair or a couch, becomes something
else, or at least becomes something other than the
meaning of the word we associate with the object.
Watrous' hope is that in exploring the looseness of
our visual experience, he might expose the closeness
of the unseen.
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