The paintings of New York based artist Josh Smith are honest depictions of our human existence.
The paintings of New York based artist Josh Smith are honest depictions of our human existence. Vibrant abstractions that embrace life as a morphing mess of coherence and contradictions, lights and dark, highs and lows. As his dense brushstrokes animate the canvas through richly colored gestures and recurring motifs, joy, playfulness and sadness interplay just as they do while we all surf the waves of life. I sat down with Josh on the occasion of his latest show JOSH SMITH: OK at Massimo de Carlo gallery in Milan: we talked the process behind the new series of dynamic large scale canvases, the ultimate purpose of his work as an honest visual practice everyone can relate to, and the struggles intrinsic to the artist’s condition. Josh highlighted the importance of letting things go a little in order to enjoy the process and fully experience the simple beauty and privilege of doing art and sharing it with others.
MI With your last exhibition Keyhole, you amplified your works in terms of scale and energy. This new series seems like a further exploration of that discourse. What was the genesis here?
JS For the past two years I have been painting more pictorially. I would think about an image and learn how to put myself into it. It has become kind of a popular style to paint figurative stuff, so since I have painted abstract work in the past, I thought it would be nice to do that again, and easy. But I realized you can’t really go back, and I had to kind of re-learn it. The Keyhole exhibition was good, but I made this one differently. I wanted this to be more assured. I hate to do the same show. I have never shown in a place like this before, it is such a classical, special gallery, so I really tried to do my best. With abstract painting you can’t know what you are doing, if you know what you are doing, probably you have a problem. You have to destroy anything you begin to understand. With all the paintings I do, when I start to feel comfortable, I kind of destroy them. I want to leave it a little broken, so the viewers can re-assemble it in their head and not feel like I put it in a box and tied it perfectly for them like a product. I wanted people to spend more time figuring it out and the way I do it is that I spend a lot of time with the work. I just try to learn it like you would do with a person.
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