Using a visual practice as an alternative expression of the theoretical and scholarly concepts that I describe in my writing allows me to further and reimagine how these modes exist in our era. Together, they create a system of images, concepts, and modes of representation based on metaphor, combinatory styles, and hybrid visions of futurity.
My work extends an abstract expressionist lineage through mythic figuration, treating history and civilization as an archive of fragments and memory. I explore how color fields operate as charged settings for gesture, thoughts, and feelings, without resolving into clear realist visions. Working in layers across time brings cutouts, images, and ideas together as palimpsests that modulate figuration with abstraction. To account for unconscious cycles of cultural being, these works articulate an abstract-mythological surrealism that remixes aesthetic traditions.
Blessing for the Home (Memento Mori), Oil on canvas 24″ x 24″, 2026
The variety of subjects in these paintings —from object studies to self-portraits and mythic figures, oneiric drawings to threshold spaces—incorporate theory and symbolic systems to consider how contemporary myths are made. When the very concept of humanity is under threat—from AI, environmental disaster, tyrannical narcissism—these paintings look back across time to combine disparate elements in visceral ways. The abstract results are based upon principles of collage and temporal palimpsest, crossing boundaries through convergence. These paintings ask how visual art and the humanities writ large remain relevant—and why. Incorporating text or diagrammatic drawing into compositions suggests the intermedial and porous nature of contemporary visual art, and my own disciplinary background as a literary and cultural critic. I gesture beyond dressing up old culture in a contemporary guise, preferring ambiguity and allusion to clear metaphors.
Crivets, 36″ x 36″, Mixed media, 2026
The range of possibilities in painting after the upheavals of modernism suggest more than a “Make it new” instinct toward speed and movement; rather, I pair this tendency with a more observational scrapbook modernism. Drawing on painting’s history with form, structure and the archive, I engage abstraction and figuration as constitutive logics rather than sequential periods. If painting continues as a revered art form into the future, it must unite conceptual thinking and technical skill. But increasingly, concepts have shifted beyond the realm of philosophy and into the arts. And while these paintings are aware of capitalism’s willingness to take on concepts as playthings or potential investment vehicles, they assert that painting is a form of thinking and being in color. As a visual philosopher of our metamodern culture, I’m interested in how our era serves as a break in human history, a new period distinct from the past three thousand years of civilization that nevertheless looks backward with admiration and reverence. My hope is that these canvases bridge text, image, and idea to suggest a new way of looking at the world around us and ourselves.
He’s a 10, mixed media, 24″ x 36″, 2025
For inquiries and pricing, email danielryanadler[at]gmail.com.
