A
gifted draftsman with a seemingly boundless, even alarming curiosity
for the infinite things of this world, Marc Dennis incessantly draws
everything he sees as a record of his encounters, merging art with
science, and perhaps more importantly, as a way to embrace and possess
the world spread out before him.
He is in pursuit of a richer, more complex, percipient painting, based on empirical notations, a sly, off-beat humor and an “odd” and “freakish beauty,” as he puts it. Dennis confessed to being a “full-time painter who is also a part-time naturalist.” His work consists of single images of flowers and animals, each lovingly, obsessively delineated. Restlessly imaginative Dennis is a formalist as well as a fantasist with scientific leanings, as concerned about composition and execution—the relationship of subject and ground, positive and negative space, the interaction of colors, the rendering of textures, light and shadow—as he is about narrative. Through formal devices, he hones in on his subjects, typically caught in the foremost plane of the painting, often projecting forward from a signature monochromatic ground, pinned and held in place like specimens to be examined, collected for a latter-day Wunderkammer. Destabilizing the familiar, dissatisfied with the limits of nature, Dennis leads us into the spectacle of subtly altered worlds, into the spellbound, enigmatic and wondrous terrains of invention and artifice. - Lilly Wei, 2006 Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, essayist and independent curator who writes frequently for Art in America and other publications. She is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific. |