“Movies, video games, and comic books were my primary sources of visual memories when I was growing up. While some of them have stood the test of time and are considered classics of the genre or medium, a lot of them are really just low art with a capital letters. It wasn’t until I started taking my education seriously, studying in Florence and going to graduate school in New York, that I began to see the parallels between this high art and historical influences
and how they coexisted with the influence of many lower artistic schools.
It is in Roy’s work in “Landmarks” and in some of his works shortly thereafter that the artist really showed himself and his talent. Works like “Steel Dream” and “We Create Our Own Meridian” are not only technically more proficient than earlier works, but also have carefully balanced compositions and a superb skill in manipulating the viewer’s eye. They also began to climb out of Roy’s crucible of “visual memory” and carve out their own strange aesthetic territory, one with the same ominous embellishments but with a new, hyper-industrial rendering of traditional landscape painting. Roy’s work shows how technological advances and the exponential growth of urban infrastructure are reshaping the Earth’s surface and remapping the human mind. The work becomes more cerebral, more existential. This is metaphysical science fiction.
As Roy grew up as an artist, he was always able to reconcile European art history with American cinema. In his artist statement for his 2014 Copenhagen solo exhibition The New I’m Old, Roy explained that he was interested in “the stories or desires to explore the human condition, influenced by films and genres such as fantasy, science fiction, post-apocalyptic, etc., that are very similar, if not identical, to what good artists have been dealing with in Western art for hundreds or even thousands of years.” Despite one or two unavoidable commonalities, “The New I’m Old” actually represents Roy’s A continuation of a significant transformation that began with the pseudo-self-portraits he began showing in 2011 and appeared in 2012’s Terraformer.
I read somewhere that Francisco Goya’s Colossus painting influenced some of Roy’s recent work, and I wanted to ask him if that was accurate. I did but had no chance. Rather than anticipating future problems, Roy’s broad speaking style rendered them obsolete. His answers take a kind of elliptical orbit around a question, covering tangentially related topics before returning to the area of the original inquiry. It was in this way that he touched Goya. “The giant figures that appear in all these works are callbacks to Goya’s The Colossus.”
My senses tell me one thing, culture tells me something different, and investigation into the nature of reality tells me a third. “
“He used that giant figure as a symbol of the fear of the unknown and the seemingly infinite abyss on the other side of the horizon. (The paintings) were done by an artist who had witnessed a lot of violence and political and social upheaval, (including) the French invasion of Spain. The scariest thing we can imagine is an authority figure rolling across the landscape, disrupting the lives of the powerless. I wanted to repurpose that giant dystopian figure not as a symbol of unknown terror and violent upheaval, but as an attempt to reconcile the conflict between the world we are building and the world we are destroying.” Perhaps the best way to read Roy’s appropriation of Goya is to look at “Colossus,” which is depressing.
Correspondingly, “Giant”. The former represents awe-inspiring power, menace, irreconcilability; the latter is a profound inner turmoil, his face distorted by its own contours, his mind crumbling under the weight of his own omnipotence. Roy is fascinated by a modern version of the same paradox: Humanity has the incredible ability to reshape the world through technological advancement, but is this brilliance and ingenuity changing us, making us blind to the consequences of this creative destruction?
The works in New I’m Old, such as “The Pasture” and “All Sides,” have an immediate aesthetic appeal—the subjects are painted in stark, bright hues and possess an organic, almost primitive energy. But the deeper intrigue lies in their philosophical underpinnings. These have polyhedral, faceless busts and people with mirror shards for faces. (Roy told me that the geometric shape that appears in the head of the subject in “The Ranch” is an amplitudehedron, a multidimensional structure used in quantum physics.) Despite (or because of) our daily sensory overload, we are no longer able to access an objective world unfiltered by technological and scientific advances and the ideologies and dogmas built around them. As Roy said in his artist statement, “There is a way of severing a character’s connection to the world – for me, that was the turning point, it was a mask, you couldn’t see the face, but more importantly, none of the characters could see outside.”
In fact, it’s more complicated than that. At this particular stage of his career, Roy was fascinated by the fragmentary nature of perception, its limitations and its longings. “I see a world through my senses, and then, as you grow and grow, the expectations of the metaphysical narrative that the larger world holds…and then a world that actually exists, and these three worlds sometimes overlap, but often have nothing to do with each other. This series of paintings (New I’m Old) is an autobiographical attempt to make peace with the truths told by my senses. For me, culture Tell me something different, and an investigation into the nature of reality tells me a third thing.” Cognition, neuropsychology, epistemology – it’s a long way from the halcyon days of drawing inspiration from summer blockbusters and the cheesy glow of American cinema, but if Roy and his work make you believe anything, it’s that there’s a connection between high and low, science and art, perception and reality, if you can find it.
His most recent work and current focus are on further explorations of perception, but also seem to aspire to a unified theory of science, art and quantum reality. For example, “Democritus after Giordano” refers to the ancient Greek philosopher credited with proposing the atomic theory and the seventeenth-century artist who painted a famous portrait of him. In “Democritus After Giordano,” Democritus’ holographic head is what Roy calls “a-spatiotemporal”—an object outside of space and time. This is appropriate content for a painting whose title clearly points to a subject’s presence two thousand years after his death. Mystical as it may seem, it’s a surprising fit for an artist passionate about breaking seemingly fixed boundaries, or in some cases peering directly through them. *
This article first appeared as a cover feature in High Fructose Issue 37, which is now sold out. Like we did? Subscribe to our print magazine here and get our latest issue. Thanks!
