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 paintings extend the 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, pressure, and hidden registers, without resolving into clear realist visions. Working with found textures, images, and ideas, I assemble palimpsests that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. In a cosmology that channels unconscious cycles of being and excess, these works articulate an abstract-mythological surrealism that remixes aesthetic traditions rather than citing them directly.
The variety of subjects in my 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 (re-)made. When the very concept of humanity is under threat—from AI, environmental disaster, and tyrannical narcissism—these paintings look back across time to combine and remix disparate elements. The surrealistic or at times abstract effect is based upon principles of collage as temporal palimpsest, colliding boundaries through convergence. Allegory as a principle—not as figuration, but as a recurring sense of human tendencies—emerges as a mode of making meaning. These paintings ask how visual art and the humanities writ large remain relevant—and why. By incorporating text into compositions, I mean to suggest 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.
The range of possibilities in painting after the upheavals of modernism suggest more than a “Make it new” instinct toward speed and movement. I pair this tendency with a more observational (meta)modernism. Drawing on painting’s history with form, structure, and the archive, I engage abstraction and figuration as co-constructive 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. These paintings are aware of capitalism’s willingness to take on concepts as playthings, but they reverently stake a claim: “Painting is thinking.” 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. 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,” acrylic, acrylic marker, oil, collaged typography on canvas, 24″ x 36″
For inquiries and pricing, email danielryanadler[at]gmail.com.
Daniel the Writer 