Lizard Brain
oil painting on linen, 23×48 inch
price: $5000 USD

http://adamholzrichter.art/

Commentary from Bruno Passos & Trevor Knapp.

From Bruno Passos:

Adam always manages to make an unlikely composition sound natural, that’s almost what happens in real life when we meet him live.

Look here: you have a piece of a bicycle, a wooden chair, a fur coat (?) and a naked woman together! Anyone who paints knows, a more complex composition has the downside of always highlighting the creator’s effort, a certain staging, a suggestion too much…. but that rule does not apply here, my friends.

The stroke (as powerful as it is natural) makes it all make sense together, always, you believe in this world, even if you don’t know exactly what it is. It’s a kind of magic!

This is a painting that grows with time, the longer you look at it, the more this world becomes ours, and suddenly everything that sounded strange seems just alive and natural!

Look at this hand, it has a lot more humanity than most people I’ve ever met. And the shrug of shoulders? At the same time, they are as restrained as they are natural, highlighting exactly the same paradoxical sensation I see on the face, an inability to act allied to a full sense of who one is. Fantastic.

From Trevor Knapp:

What I love about this painting, and with a lot of Adam’s paintings, is how this work feels very matter of fact and casual upon first viewing. A model sitting on a chair, with a bike hanging just above in the background. But then I start to catch small details, the hand reveals itself in a more complex manner with strokes of vibrant reds and purple, I start to see how the brush lines vibrate against each other, how everything glides about. How the bike imposes over the figure with its mechanical forebodingness. Eyes gazing, almost agitated, towards the light… bringing the feeling of a sort of realization, like “Really? This is it? To be ruled by machine?”, then resignation into the flow of things.

And like, goddamn, the movement in this painting is wonderfully hidden within the necessity for him to paint his model just as they sat, exactly as how they are feeling. It lets the mood of how the person feels really shine through to the rest of the painting, how Adam’s almost psychedelic color palette reacts to what it sees within the surroundings. And with the subtle slices of light paint brush strokes within dark spaces about, it vibrates off of the canvas. A warm melancholy… and a fucking terrific painting that I could sit and stare at for quite some time, hats off to you, Adam.