Tom Berenz

Steeped in the paradigm of American and European figurative painting, I dissect and reconstruct tropes of contemporary visual communication as a way to create a challenging visual language used to narrate contemporary issues. Personal, socio-political, and ideological issues help generate my imagery as I participate in the contemporary conversation of painting.

Many painters, including myself, are interested in the limitations of the medium; however, we are also trying to overcome those limitations. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it seemed that artists were continually trying to move forward as fast as possible.  Today, many artists are looking back and thinking about all the possibilities that were only briefly explored.  I am interested in the “lost gaps” of Modernism, Abstraction, Cubism, Pop, Deconstructivism and other movements.  As a painter, I am exploring how different “movements” can exist in one painting.  By taking this tack, I believe that my work will be better aligned with contemporary painting discourse.

My paintings are about my intellectual and visceral relationship to the world around me.  Through the motif of chaos, I examine personal narratives, with some being more literal and others more enigmatic. My current work deals with a single person, a “sitter” in a chair. This series explores the impact COVID-19 has had on myself and society as a whole. The melding of figuration, cubism, and abstraction conjures notions of loss, place, memory, space and time are central as I reexamine personal experiences from my past and present.

I am interested in expanding the vocabulary within each painting and throughout the group. The work is ultimately about two-dimensional space— the language of painting— and the way an idea is transformed into a painting. I am interested in blurring the lines between realism and abstraction, life and death, beauty and horror, devastation and the sublime.