Graham Gillmore
SUBMERSIONS Exploring the word as image, and the image as word, Graham Gillmore’s work balances between treacherous antipodes: pathos and wit, defiance and charm, and more basically, the anguish of experience and the rapture of its aesthetic expression. The twisting knife of a smartass remark, the threatening anonymity of a clinical evaluation, and the famous-last-words potential of pillow talk are articulated in his oeuvre with a chromaticism their ruthlessness seems to beg. Employing puns and punch lines both lewd and mawkish, and referencing clichés, board games, rebuses, barroom banter, and graffiti, his paintings are by subtle turns playful, earnest, and caustic. At times surrounded by bubbles that are interlinked via intestinal networks of lines, the letters and syllables he depicts take on lives of their own, as though reverberating in the mind suggestively, or suspiciously, connoting an overwhelming variety of possible meanings that appear to jostle for recognition. Expressive of a charged synthesis between distinct types of mark—letter and stroke—his works appear as the visual equivalents of utterances, whether poignant or pointed… or of how we receive and interpret these. Many paintings seem to emphasize tone (as it denotes both voice and color), implying at once the intensity of the experience a given message or phrase insinuates, and the private stamina required to endure its meaning on the one hand, or its ambiguity on the other. Thus while rage, disgust and disillusionment seem to propel it, his art is also tempered by a humor that is all the more expansive, even forgiving for this, and which acts as the grace note essential to beauty. Visually, Gillmore’s paintings vacillate between a sleek neon intensity bordering on the lurid, and a bumbling homespun quality recalling a troubled adolescent’s secret notebook. At times broadcasting the artificial vibrancy of candy or cosmetics, his palette suggests how the moth might see the flame. The quasi-confessional quality of certain paintings, meanwhile, intimates any urban sophisticate’s biography, suggesting the universality of both our humiliations and our kneejerk laughter at those of others. With that instinctual excoriation turned on himself, it appears that the artist achieves a pervasive sympathy with the human quandary, one that in its lacerating irony is all the more sincere. —Thomas Breidenbach
Graham Gillmore SUBMERSIONS Exhibition List: 1. Psych Test, Oil on Panel, 72 x 90”, $32,000.00 2. Mysticism Scale, Oil on Panel, 72 x 60, $26,000.00 3. Vu Ja De, Oil on Panel, 72 x 60”, $26,000.00 4. Psycho Farm Ecology, Oil on Panel, 48 x 72”, $23,500.00 5.Aisle/Window, Acrylic on Paper, 50 x 38”, $16,500.00 6. Op Or Tunist, (diptych) Acrylic on paper, 30 x 44 1/2”, $14,000.00 7. Pencil Me in Pencil Me out’, Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 48”, $20,000.00 8. Case Closed,Acrylic on antique ledger paper ,96 x 83” Price on request 9. Domestic/International, Acrylic on Paper, 60” x 48”, $12,500.00 10. Star glazing dough-nut, 2007 Acrylic on paper 22.5 x 30”, $6,000.00 11. Einstein/Frankenstein, 2004 Acrylic on paper 22.5 x 30” $6,000.00 12. Swollen Overtures, 2004 Acrylic on paper 18.5 x 22.5” $4,500.00 13. Bridge/Tunnel, 2013 Acrylic on paper 38 x 50” $10,000.00 14. GG Marginalized, Second Version, Acrylic on Paper 50 x 38”, $16,500.00 15. The Progressive Effects Of Painting, Acrylic On Canvas 48 x 54”, $20,000.00 16. Mondrian/Wetdream, Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 40”, $18,500.00 17. GG Marginalized, Acrylic on Paper, 50 x 38”, $10,000.00 18. I have Had An Experience, Acrylic on Canvas, 72 x 86”, $30,000.00 19. I Have Had An Experience, Acrylic on Paper, 26 x 40”, $7,500.00 15. Psych Test (Study), Acrylic on Paper, 38 x 50”, $16,500.00