YES was incredibly difficult for me to execute because at heart, I am a rather cautious person when it comes to accepting responsibility for important things, like making dinner for friends. (I hate the idea of giving someone food poisoning. And YES, I have poisoned myself.)

One a more serious note, YES plays out the other side of the equation from the NO painting: if the infinite, or truth, is something we hallucinate because we can imagine something finite, then the act of accepting this state of affairs is intimately and immediately a release of tension – it’s the lie that uncovers the truth of the situation. (The truth is always in relation to something that is false.) It’s this release, the opening of the flood gates, the flick of the switch to let the current flow, to let the light in, that is, for me, what it means to say, “YES!”

While bringing this work to life with the depiction of a sky, I sort of bumped into a geometrical symmetry that is commonly used in the decoration of the domes of churches and mosques, but then I broke the symmetry to allow a properly earthly and grounded sensibility to flourish at the bottom of the painting. This sensibility is a continuation of the Eccentricity Paintings, in which I circumvent the aesthetics of religious decoration and illustration in order to bring about a mundane glory to the work. Maybe this is another way to describe camp?

One detail I enjoy is the letter “E” in the composition: I have created a grid of squares to render the letter by using a matrix of circles. This element acts as a further proof for me (see the painting and accompanying text for NO on this website), of the difference between the space produced by pixels to that of a matrix of circular forms as in the algorithms I am using to compose these works. These “pixels” (the squares that the “E” is constructed of) resonate within the intersections of the matrix of circles, so they function in a more dynamic fashion than those created only by rectilinear means. You can sense the difference when you compare the YES and NO paintings alongside one another.