Dan Colen

A mark is just a decision, a touch that can go in so many different directions. . . . There’s so much that you’re not seeing, so many decisions. That’s where the art happens. . . . The viewer doesn’t ever get to witness it, but they have to know that it was there and there has to be a space for the imagination. —Dan Colen Moving between diverse styles and subjects, Dan Colen investigates the conceptual stakes of materiality and mark making. Interested in how the physical properties of mediums dictate their specific forms and symbolic resonances, Colen oscillates in his work between rigorous artisanal technique and the aesthetics of chance. Alongside his works in oil on canvas, he has often employed unconventional materials such as chewing gum, flowers, and trash, relinquishing control of his work’s final appearance to their unpredictable surfaces. He also produces time-based and three-dimensional works, including animatronic sculptures and performances. With imagery adapted from popular culture, he explodes the boundaries between fine art and subculture, interrogating the dynamic between images and the materials from which they are composed. Born in Leonia, New Jersey, Colen received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. In his earliest works, Colen labored over precise oil renderings of banal interiors—a sloppy apartment bathroom, an adolescent bedroom, a camping tent—into which he introduced the presence of the supernatural—the Blue Fairy, Jesus Christ, twinkling cherubs, his deceased grandfather. A subsequent series, the Candle paintings (2003–10), drew inspiration from the Disney film Pinocchio (1940). In these works, Colen honed in on the moment in which artistic materials suddenly become alive and autonomous from their maker: the space of the canvas embodies Geppetto’s worktable—where Pinocchio becomes “real”—and a message appears in the smoke left by a just-extinguished candle flame. He has described the series as “an attempt at conversing with god or the infinite.” From 2006 Colen explored the idea of finding beauty in the accidental in a series of abstract “paintings” made from chewing gum. Experimenting with different treatments, he became fascinated by how the medium insisted upon certain forms: “It’s about tapping into a material’s power and figuring out what it wants to do,” he explained in 2014. The Gum paintings (2006–16) marked the beginning of his engagement with nontraditional mediums in the space of painting, which would include confetti and steel studs as well as flowers and trash. In other series, Colen used conventional mediums and techniques to emulate “low” or abject materials: In his graffiti-inspired Board Paintings (2003–17), for example, he painstakingly replicated haphazard spatters of aerosol paint using enamel paint, while in his Birdshit paintings (2006–08/2015–16), he manipulated oil paint to emulate the droppings of pigeons. By 2010, Colen had begun to return to figurative subject matter in his paintings, beginning with the Miracle series (2010–18). As in the Candle paintings, he based these works on Disney stills—in this case, from the mythic Fantasia (1940)—as a means to tap into the animation giant’s stronghold on our collective imagination. Echoing the magical subject matter, Colen’s bursts of powder, puddles of liquid, and raking pulls and pushes examine the intrinsic properties and potential revelations of oil paint itself. Colen’s Desert paintings (2015–19) further the exploration, commenting upon the artifice of paint and the boundary between materiality and mirage with lush re-creations of the trompe l’oeil tunnels used by Wile E. Coyote to trap the Road Runner in the Looney Tunes cartoon series. His HELP paintings (2019–20) reveal an interest in the medium’s semiotic—rather than material—capacity. Featuring the message in a bottle as a leitmotif, with imagery adapted from Disney’s The Rescuers (1977), this series takes the act of communication as its subject, exploring questions around how meaning is transmitted through painting, and to whom. Colen continually probes concepts in the history of modern art such as “high” and “low,” artistic agency, and medium specificity. In recent years a variety of projects with a social-equity focus have become increasingly central to his artistic practice. He founded Sky High Farm in 2011, a Hudson Valley nonprofit committed to increasing food security in New York’s underserved communities by providing donations of fresh fruits and vegetables. In 2017 Colen collaborated with RxArt on the installation Moments like this . . . for St. Mary’s Healthcare System for Children in Queens, New York, a facility that serves a community of two thousand living with acute special needs and medical conditions.