How to Find Pure Faith in Art and Everything

The deepest ocean blue rolls with earth green, each hue primordial in the force it exacts on the other. They consume the scraps of cloth, rubber, and wire affixed within, the refuse transforming into life pink, clay orange, and energy yellow. Cosmogenesis and apocalypse in 11’ x 17’ of garbage and oil paint. This, I think, is what Dan Colen wants to create.

One cannot face art as large as his Trash paintings without being swept up in the moment, their absolute absence of why, pure and defiant.

From the humblest beginnings—literally the bathrooms of Gagosian Gallery—to the largest spaces in Dallas Contemporary, where his first retrospective currently lives, the artist is still all too often asked. Why? It’s a question he can’t seem to shake. “It’s a mystery to me. I wouldn’t be making it if it wasn’t,” Colen admits, before addressing it back to his loudest critics. “It’s just so silly that to use it as a weapon, or as a tool of comedy, could actually be a consideration for sophisticated people. It always blows my mind.” These are Trash paintings like the massive work in the room before them is Confetti, like the Texas-sized Texas show is called Oil Painting. They are. It is. So?

He instructs, “You just have to allow for them, you know?”

We pass from room to room: first, Me, Jesus and the Children, a monumental trompe l’oeil spray painting of Dan’s chest, a Jesus piece, and cartoon cherub psychopomps who crash the viewer into its solid plastic face; then, Whatever, a 5' x 6' scene extracted from Pinocchio, where an extinguished candle lights a room; two walls of Confetti, the Moments Like These Never Last series, as varied in aura as they are in approach and technique; four walls of indomitable Trash paintings; four more of his Miracle works, oil medium and raw pigment powder conjurations so boundless they literally escape their backings.

Though a narrative seems to follow, it is perhaps the show’s only red herring. The largest work, a Confetti piece, is his most recent, though the series began in 2009. But in its perfect snapshot of commotion, its nowness shows. "It truly is just a series of marks, and in that is so much,” he divines. “It’s an endless, infinite series of feelings. […] This is the newest work in the show, and I wasn’t even thinking about this, but I’m always trying to capture a moment, and all of a sudden the moment doesn’t matter—it turns into something that has nothing to do with time.” It's a painting so big it has earned a museum, and not the other way around (as institutions might have you think). It is the Big Bang, the Allegory of Divine Providence, Jasper Johns' White Flag, and what Herzog calls “ecstatic truth,” all at once.

Yet, whether explosively arbitrary or candle-precise, painted by one hand or by a dedicated multitude of assistants’, Colen says no work is free of his ego—but I believe what he means is his heart. “I have to believe in all these things 100% for them to exist,” he says. “I have to think that they have unknown potential, and if I don’t feel like that, they shut down.” This is the crux of his practice: a conviction for which he is all too often accused of contrarianism, overconfidence, and being contrived. "The one thing nobody else can do for me is give me faith," he dismisses. In a world of suggestions and superpositions, this obviously makes him a target. But he believes, and that’s enough for me to believe, too.

So I show up at the opening of Oil Painting in as close as I can get to a Dan Colen jersey: a clear head, a purpose, a pretty girl, and a flannel. This, I think, is enough.

Dan Colen's Oil Painting is on view at Dallas Contemporary through August 21, 2016. Click here for more information.

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