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Trans-Secular Figurative Abstraction

My paintings begin not with looking, but with what keeps vibrating in the body after the night has ended. I am interested in the residue of collective intensity once music, bodies, and speech have dispersed: a pressure that exceeds memory and resists language. I call that condition Carnal Resonance.
 

These works do not depict sexual acts so much as the formal life of desire when it overflows and becomes structure. Figures appear as totems, idols, columns, hybrid creatures, or compressed masses. Bodies repeat, stack, fuse, and dissolve into shared choreographies where individual identity gives way to rhythm, coexistence, and contagion. The erotic is inseparable here from the vegetal, the geometric, the ritual, and the grotesque. Humor and exaggeration matter as much as sensuality; they push the paintings toward a carnivalesque register in which pleasure and strangeness remain bound together.
 

The paintings move in dialogue with lineages in which the body becomes sign, architecture, and rhythm—from European modernism to Latin American symbolic figuration—yet they reactivate that vocabulary under contemporary conditions shaped by nightlife, explicit eroticism, algorithmic visibility, and the instability of the self within collective experience. I think of this field as Trans-Secular Figurative Abstraction: a space where vegetal, animal, geometric, erotic, and mystical forms coexist without fixed hierarchy.
 

In an image economy defined by speed and dematerialization, oil allows me to insist on weight, drag, and duration. These paintings are not documents of the night. They are its afterimage in matter: evidence that something survived, continued to resonate, and refused to disappear.

SK

© 2025 by Syd Krochmalny

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