Steven Orner

 

My work over the past few years has been devoted to exploring the dual themes of utopia and dystopia. Working in a non-traditional figurative style, my work has a strong connection to storytelling; my paintings are usually constructed as static or suspended narratives that often suggest the appearance of montage. In my most recent paintings and drawings, a range of modern and popular imagery, from figures and caricatures to landscapes to works of architecture, are taken from their conventional contexts and reconfigured into unusual and sometimes anachronistic “genre scenes”. I would describe my working process as a kind of extraction system that pulls concepts from the world of objects, ideas and observations and then folds them into another reality, rethinking and reformulating that world into another. For me, this is something related to the work of allegory: everyday objects and places with their literal meanings are transformed in the process of recreating them on the canvas and endowed with another, poetic meaning. At the same time, the form of this process allows for the different elements on the canvas to confront one another much like in the cutting-and-pasting of montage, where the seamless continuity of our perceived reality is disturbed by the incompatible combinations of objects, scale, textures and tones within the frame of the painting. It is in this appropriation and undermining of utopian appearances that I have sought to develop my chosen theme through the formal process of painting.