Julia Wachtel in The New York Times
4 November 2018
Article by Antwaun Sargent His Example Helped Them Find a Voice, in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
I remember going to MoMA and seeing his “Campbell Soup Cans” [1962], and it was at that moment I decided to become an artist. What makes Warhol the gold standard is the utter elegance, simplicity and directness of his paintings — his ability to distill a world of information out of a picture through minimal but brilliant intervention. It reveals a profound social and technological complexity. He deals with the deepest of human emotions: desire, fear, voyeurism, how the individual intersects with culture, and the fabric of meaning.
Like Warhol, I use silk-screen, a technology made for seriality and reproduction. Unlike Warhol I always pair the silk-screen panels with at least one hand-painted panel. I sometimes duplicate the hand-painted panels, shifting the logic so that the hand-painted panel becomes the repeated image. They are nearly identical but it is their difference, and failure of perfection, that interests me.
There is an incredible sense of longing, loss and desire in Warhol’s attachment to the world of culture. He couldn’t be Marilyn Monroe but he wanted to be. Those images of her, I think, are a displacement of his own desire. Painting for me has been the format to address deeply negative, culturally constructed ideas like racism and sexism, as well as desire...
