Michael Covello

Region: South

Website: http://www.michaelcovello.com

City / State: Tampa, FL

I use a language of hybridized abstraction, where diverse formal elements contradict and complete each other. The spaces I depict within a painting or installation are dense, and at times antagonistic. I am not interested in making work that is easy to view. Instead, I strive for a language of excess, where a maximalist, nonrepresentational vocabulary creates a challenging space for the viewer to inhabit. By provoking my audience to reevaluate their relationship to viewing, I confront the typical relationships we have to image, architecture, and environment. By working with ideas such as assembly, demolition, accumulation, and containment, I restructure time as something geological in scale. For instance, through masking, overpainting, and removal, compositional elements undergo continuous cycles of emerging, shifting, and concealment. Thus, as I work on a piece, my attempts to organize its space are constantly being folded back on themselves as the process evolves. As an artist exploring and reacting to this unsteady terrain, I see my artistic process as a suspension between remembering, forgetting, and rebuilding.