"Casper David Friedrich said, 'The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.' It was my time at SACI, in ’94, that set me on this path of the exploration and reconciliation of my internal imagery with the external world.

My paintings are the result of a life spent wanting to know what forces make up the cosmos.  They are totems to the sublime nature of change, and pictorial meditations meant to slow our passage through the 4th dimension. It is the search for a balance of opposing forces – atomic cohesion vs. repulsion, the manufactured vs. natural systems of organization, precision vs. abstraction, hard vs. soft, and broken vs. whole – that drives my desire to discover the divine systems of the universe.

While acknowledging their cinematic escapist influences, my dystopian constructions of a new American Mythology join a more psychological tradition of apocolyptic self-exploration and spectacle.  Jack Goldstein, Cormac McCarthy, and Chris Maker would recognize this imaginary future, where cities dream about when they were once whole.  A 'Romantic Landscape,' born of a post-Hollywood age.  My time at SACI Florence gave me a compass with which to begin to connect the dots of my contemporary cultural experience within the greater map of Art History.  My work is so much the richer for it, and my semester there finds its way into my studio every day." Jean-Pierre Roy