Eric LoPresti

Conflict involves opposing parties. When there is a war between two countries, the two are involved in a conflict. They will perhaps lure their allies into the conflict, and all sides will suffer casualties. We cry for the casualties and decry the war. Do we ever cry for the battlefield? Have we ever? This sullen party hurts too…

“For the past several years I’ve been working on the themes of conflict and unseen forces. My last show was called Force Against Force, and was comprised of diptychs, each of which included an abstract side and a representational side. The pieces were about explicit conflict, whether naturally-occurring or human-made… My current show, Fade, is about the desert, the Cold War, and the development of nuclear weapons. This is a very personal subject for me — I grew up in a Cold-War town, near the Hanford Site in the desert steppe of South-Eastern Washington State. The landscape there is dotted with structures for the production or plutonium, or the storage of nuclear waste. The physical aftermath of the US-USSR conflict is really only visible at Hanford, and similar sites throughout the US and former Soviet Union. One of the main Soviet sites, Semipalatinsk, is located in a steppe which looks a lot like Hanford.”

“At the same time the desert landscape is sublimely beautiful. Metaphorically, the desert is the place one goes to be alone, to reflect, and reconsider one’s place on the map. It is a harsh place, unsuitable for human life, but because it is so inhospitable it is also quiet, and a perfect place to think. Now that I live in New York, I find that I really miss being the wide-open sky, the blistering sun, and that sense of perspective.”

“Color is the most important part of the work — it sets the tone for the painting, and can change the meaning of the image. The colors in Fade are the subtle tones of desert steppe: greys, ochres, pinks, sage-greens, and the clear blue of the sky.”

As stunningly beautiful these landscapes are, is it not time to think about the realities of our life? Why do we continually let greed, hatred and non-existent beings control our lives?

Text and images kindly permitted to be republished on this blog for the artist himself. Please visit LoPresti’s site to view more of his work.