Anthony Titus:
Ruptures and Reconciliations

Through the successive layering of paint, Titus transforms crumbled, draped, and wrapped canvas into rigid structures of mysterious materiality and radiant color. Titus’ deconstructed paintings conflate surface and structure, allowing the paintings to break away from their frames into gravity-defying compositions.

Titus describes the process of making the works as “a cycle of making, unmaking, and remaking” that closely mirrors how the current social fabric seems to be coming apart in ways that are unprecedented.

A falling petal
Strikes one floating on a pond,
And they both sink.

– Richard Wright, Haiku

Titus has chosen the above poem from Richard Wright’s Haiku as the conceptual ground for his new series. Being one of the most influential figures writing about the African-American experience, Wright’s work is a fitting vantage point to contemplate the ongoing societal tensions in American life.

“The three-dimensional relief of Anthony Titus’s single-color constructions gives them a powerful presence, almost as if they are alive and playing with the natural light of ‘T’ Space reflected off the semi-gloss surfaces. Recalling Clement Greenberg’s infamous 1961 decree that painting could achieve autonomy only by embracing absolute flatness, Anthony does the opposite—he embraces space, sometimes around the edges of the picture plane, sometimes in relief, and in unpredictable ways. Here, architecture redefines painting.”

– Steven Holl