Artists Space

Recent Paintings
Jordan Kantor

September 14 – October 28, 2006

Jordan Kantor produces large-scale paintings of recent media representations as a means to address the role of images in our experience of the physical world. In them, trauma, death, beauty, and history collide as private thoughts and public spectacles are reprocessed through paint. His paintings depict bodies that have been emptied of their gravity, tactility, and smell in the flat, dimensionless space of news photography, bestowed with new pictorial physicality. Painted, the life-sized bodies refuse the fate of the diminutive photographs on which they are based: to be ignored, folded-over, and thrown away with yesterday’s papers.

A black and white oil painting of two people on black tile flooring. Only their legs are visible. One person is lying on the ground, the other is squatting and holding a notebook.
Jordan Kantor, Untitled (forensic scene), 2004. Oil on canvas, 32 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist. [A black and white oil painting of two people on black tile flooring. Only their legs are visible. One person is lying on the ground, the other is squatting and holding a notebook.]