"Modern embodiments of animal
combativeness inform and compose the iconography of this work: boxers,
musclemen, wrestlers, bad-asses. I am particularly interested in the
most contradictory of these figures: those who have a lot of front but
little actual function. The two most recurrent images in this work are
the dull-witted brute who relies on posturing, and the macho fighter
unable to acknowledge his physical limitations, or is well past his
heyday.
"The fact that the innate brutishness that resides
in all people (particularly males) can be simultaneously frightening,
pitiable, and hilarious is of boundless interest to me, and it has
become a seemingly inexhaustible subject. I am drawn to the signs
of the inherently mean human animal, as it shows up in the confusion
of present day.
"This work often draws from the patterns of behaviors,
increasingly capitalized on and exploited in advertising and marketing:
the need to be tough, strong, a champion. The cult of the unassailable
and untouchable individual in sports figures, action-movie mythology
and the like continues to show astonishing influence on popular culture
and is used to sell virtually everything.
"The results of this phenomenon are
usually quite ludicrous. Hordes of regular folk believe they need
muscles; the street and biker gang look is assimilated into fashion;
"kicking ass" becomes the most overreaching and overused
figures of speech. In many ways, my work is a reflection of the absurdity
of this faux "bad-ass" climate, and a chronicle of my negotiation
of it. I frequently employ images (and often text) that recall my
Appalachian youth, the redneck ideal of masculinity as well as the
sorrow of rural poverty and callowness.
"The hundreds of figures I have depicted in the
course of my career have no heads. They are not so much severed (although
I have no problem with such an interpretation) as merely omitted.
This is quite deliberate, and primarily serves to prevent the figures
from having a specific identity, to preserve their anonymity. They
must remain average, like their unremarkable physiques. In my collages
- made up of many small drawings - I combine animal imagery and other
things that give the works an anthropological feel. I want to balance
the elegant with the vulgar, and I often combine an old-master drawing
look with the most crass of contemporary images.
"I hope that viewing and interacting with this
work will not be an experience reserved only for the art-initiated.
Although drawing on the language of contemporary art, both pictorially
and conceptually the work is easily recognizable to everyone."
- Paul Mullins
