Sean Gannon

In his latest series of paintings, Gannon continues his ongoing exploration of interpersonal intimacy, sexuality, and the human form, collapsing figures into abstractions that reduce the body into basic shapes and compositions. Combining industrial materials with art historical references to Modernism and the Chicago Imagists, Gannon populates his work with stylized characters that coalesce into a personal vocabulary and lexicon of images. The paintings are formed through a process that involves building up and breaking down multiple layers through the use of sanding and painting techniques that aim for the removal of the hand from the work. The result is a sense of palpable tension between the paintings’ personal origins and their sensual minimalist surfaces.

Gannon notes that his work could be as much about toy design as it is about Mondrian or vocoders, a synthesizer that produces sounds from an analysis of speech input. And it is perhaps this analogy that best describes how Gannon’s combination of subjective painterly impulses with the restraints of a reductive process produces works that are imbued with personal intensity yet possess an almost untraceable relationship to his first initial drive.