Elliott Green by David Schulz

With a Jungian insistence, psychic activity punches its way into consciousness via Elliott Green’s latest paintings. Their backgrounds contain the most puzzling penciled-in farmhouses, vaguely sketched forms that seem to act as behavioral barometers for the foregrounds cast of morphing characters. In the movie The Stepford Wives a strange bell sounds each noon and all the village women become hypnotized. These farmhouses have a similar effect on Green’s characters: their central position in each painting seems to force the characters into compliant circles, giving the effect that the farm exerts a subliminal directorial role. Green’s characters, in their simple, cartoon-like forms are like caricatures of emotion, one represents greed; one lust; one envy. Grotesque in their consumptive gestures, poking and prodding each other like Harpies, they are connected to each other by various limbs, appearing to morph from one personality to the next. These circling fiends are unignorable and raw. And through them, Green explores the complexity of human desire, and the unseen forces that form such desire.

—David Schulz