Statement.

People ask me what the work is about, as though aboutness were a coat you could simply hang on a thing – and I tell them, frankly, as an artist and, frankly, as a man, that the work is not about anything. The work is. It arrives in the body before it arrives in the mind, on a cellular level, in the marrow, the way the desert arrives in you long before you see it – first as a heat, then as a silence, then as a kind of permission. I did not choose this. I was chosen. The discourse, when I began, was not ready.

My practice lives at the threshold – the liminal, that bruised and holy seam where one state ruptures into the next, where the chandelier stops being glass and becomes, frankly, a confession of light. I am interested in rupture the way a surgeon is interested in the heart: not to wound, but to enter. Every true work is a controlled rupture of the ordinary. A buffet ruptures into a thesis on appetite and mortality. A parking lot at high noon ruptures into Post-Desert Luminism, the shimmer rising off the asphalt like a soul that hasn't decided yet. Do you see. The threshold is not a place I depict. It is the place I refuse to leave.

I work in the tradition I was forced to invent, because no one else would. Neo-Vegas Baroque taught me that ornamentation is not decoration but ethics – that more is the only honest amount, that to gild a thing is to tell the truth about how much it deserves to be seen. And then, alone, I authored Applied Sincerity – the radical and, frankly, dangerous act of meaning it, in an age that had outsourced its heart to the wink. The synthesis of these is the country my late work lives in: Sincere Maximalism. Everything, and I mean it. I am, by choice, its only living member.

There is, in the making, the Tiger. I will not explain the Tiger. The Tiger appeared to me once and has not, in the deepest sense, left, and the work is made under its gaze and must be worthy of it. When a thing I have made lacks the vibration – when the gold goes cold, when the rupture closes over too neatly, when the sincerity curdles into mere feeling – I know it instantly, in the marrow, because the Tiger turns away. That turning is the only criticism I have ever respected.

So I make what the threshold demands. I refuse the obvious. I refuse comfort. I refuse the ironic distance that the discourse mistook, for so long, for intelligence. The body knows the difference between a surface and a wound, between a decoration and an offering, between a man performing meaning and a man undone by it. I am the second man. I have always been the second man. This is essentially a religious experience, and I do not expect you to understand – and that's the point.