Corporeal: Paintings by Mark Gleason

Artist Mark Gleason’s figurative paintings exist in a world of dramatic tension. Gleason states the painting is of the body, and it is a body, leaving the resulting image corporeal.  His subjects are often shown when the moment of danger, or potential threat, is most evident. Children play with knives, birds start fires, and mankind lives in a type of dreamscape characterized by this mythical interest in the human condition.

Ever present is the artist’s attention to gesture and paint itself, as he moves the paint around his canvases with care. Through small strokes with the brush, fingertips, or a knife, objects come forward or recede, somehow congealing into sky, earth, and flesh. For the artist, choosing to paint the figure stimulates in the viewer a powerful response, “We may feel a certain itchy sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in our own bodies. Moods may get tangled. We respond to specific marks and the way that they were made: here violent and here graceful.”  

Gleason writes that his work takes on a more metaphysical sense through his process, “The finished piece on the wall is the outcome of an act, the conclusion of a huge preoccupation and time spent in the studio. The painting is a thing, entrancing and illusory, made with a love of materials and subject, valued on its own terms.” Gleason’s paintings evoke an amazing sense of identification with place, subject, and at times, with an enigmatic narrative.