In Thomas Eggere's recent paintings, figures enter thickets of agitated brushstrokes and zones of candy color, impossible landscapes of painterly marks. These figures appear in two distinct ways: as cutouts, dislocated from the canvas by a narrow, encircling border of contrasting color; and as pentimenti, palimpsests of drawn and redrawn human contours emerging out of (or falling back into) fields of paint. But cutouts and pentimenti could not be more different. They represent two opposing poles in the possible relation between a figure and a ground. The first strategy suggests alienation, as though both gestural marks and the monochrome expanses surrounding them were rejecting figures like so many transplanted organs. The brushwork around groups of boys in works such as Waste Management, 2012; Rodeo, 2012; and Carousel, 2013, for instance, tends to be agitated and crude, implying that the serene modulation of paint in other areas of the canvas has been disrupted by the entry of a foreign body—the human image. Pentimenti, on the other hand, index the emergence of figures through stages of revision that occur over time and are wholly internal to painterly procedures. In Eggerer’s collision of cutouts and pentimenti, alienation encounters immanence—just as the monochrome, a mode associated with cool anonymity, meets expressionist gesture, the epitome of painterly self-assertion.
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