The Somnambulist

Marc Handelman
The Somnambulist
2006
Oil on canvas
243.5 x 243.5 cm

Marc Handelman is a visual artist from the U.S. who engages the afterlives of the genre of landscape through the media of painting, installation, artists' books and others. Followed by an analysis on the sustained imperial rhetoric of American painting reconfigured in contemporary life including corporate advertising and political branding, Handelman's work explores the intimacy of aesthetics in the conditioning of knowledge and the legitimization of colonial and environmental violence.

The Somnambulist, which the artist himself describes as depicting the light, shows concentric diamonds cyan and violet slowly radiate outward from the edges of a black center, fading as they go. This layout of colors reminds spectators of a computer turning off, sucking its screen image into itself.

(Commentary & Translation: Tomoya Iwata)