JOE THOMSON SAAN
2025 | JOE THOMSON
SAAN
Oct 24 - Dec, 2025
Opening Reception: October 24, 2025, 6-8 pm.
Joe Thomson, Westinghouse HQ, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 in.
My interest in painting autobiographically has been longstanding. Making autobiographical images is less about my interest in the "real" and more about my disinterest in the invented. A life in the world provides more than can ever be offered proper consideration. Until recently I've struggled to find a way through the images that didn't feel illustrative or defusingly literal. This body of work is one in which l've let go of the elements that l've always thought were necessary to communicate an experience, wherein I've given myself permission to be indifferent to the narrative and allowed, intermittent in the process, an oscillation between the topic and the purely formal needs of the painting to dictate action.
There is a practical element in my autobiographical approach, it provides me with a coping mechanism to address my phobia of time passing. I am given the ability to extend experiences through my transcription. A moment I felt long ago can be turned to a painting or paintings occupying as much of my attention as I desire, for as long as I desire. It's a kind of protest against the linear domination of time. It's an intentional curation of significance, where time becomes a space for impressions of the real to be offered stations sized according to my valuation, not the consequences of a churning invisible force to which we are also invisible.
I incorporate exposed gesso in many of the images. It behaves as a shorthand for nothingness, as it relates to death andmeaning.Theexposed gesso creates the option of not painting a thing, to not fill the canvas. This engenders everything included with the responsibility of necessity. It facilitates the idea of the incomplete proposal, that the image is not a representation of an idea of a reality, it's a fragment of a representation. It is not a total system that's being enacted, it's a piece of a system being denied the ability to function. It's an action suspended in a terrible state of being denied reaction in totality. What do things look like in the context of death, where nothingness is the only and final answer to our actions? When purpose or meaning or ambition are not the concluding sentence, that role ceded to something infinite and unfeeling?
The paintings were finished between August 20th, 2024 and January 28th, 2025. Some are depictions of experiences I had so long ago that the memory is little more than coloured fog. Some were made within the moments of their own experiential genesis, vivid and wholly felt while brush touched canvas. The nearly impossible task of image making is to improve upon blankness. They are autobiographical paintings.
-Joe Thomson