The potential of this kind of work lies in its ability to pervert reality. This is not to say distort reality, to make it into a “cruel illusion,” but transform it: to manipulate and reconfigure reality according to one’s impulses and for its own sake.

…the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills.

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved.

There is a richness in color and fullness of form in these works that drew me into them immediately, and held me there. Within them, colors and shapes seem to crumble and grind together, the complexions plow through each other and themselves.

The layered surface cascades into itself as quickly as it interrupts itself. It vibrates like a field of electricity, full of chaos and psychedelic apparitions, and yet is held together by an arresting unity which appears to emerge at once from above and below — that is, it appears as calculated as it does spontaneous.

The best possible description for the piece is one line from the poem by Billie Chernicoff that comes with the download: “The nothing inside of a bell, unfurling…”

“I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual.”

What’s objectionable for Lehrer is that the products of the culture industry transmit a comfortable (numbing) attitude towards reality as opposed to an “ambiguous” or “critical” one, which art formerly laid claim to.