“I grew up with film, video games, and comic books as the primary source of my visual memory. While some of them have stood the test of time and have been considered classics of the genre or the medium, a lot of it was really just capital L Low art. It wasn’t until I started taking my education seriously, studying in Florence and going to graduate school here in New York that I started to see parallels between this kind of high art, historical influences
and how they were running alongside a lot of these low art genre influences.
It was Roy’s work in Landmarks and some of the stuff shortly thereafter in which the artist really announced himself and his talent. Pieces like “Dream of Parted Steel” and “We Make Our Own Meridian” were not only more technically proficient than earlier works, with carefully balanced compositions and a superior knack for manipulating the viewer’s eye. They also began to climb out of the melting pot of Roy’s “visual memory” and stake out their own strange aesthetic territory, one with similarly portentous trappings, but with a new, hyper-industrialized rendering of traditional landscape painting. Roy’s work suggested how technological progress and the exponentiality of urban infrastructure were reshaping the surface of the earth and remapping the human mind. The work was getting more cerebral, more existential. This was metaphysical sci-fi.
Throughout his growth as an artist, Roy remains exceptionally able to reconcile European art history with American cinema. In his artist statement for 2014’s solo exhibition in Copenhagen, The New Me Is Already Old, Roy explains that he is interested in how, “within these cinematic and genre influences like fantasy, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic stuff, there were these stories or desires to wanna explore the human condition that were very similar to, if not exactly the same as stuff that fine artists have been dealing with in Western art for hundreds, if not thousands of years.” But despite the inevitable common thread or two, The New Me Is Already Old actually represents the continuation of a significant shift for Roy that began with the pseudo-self-portraits he started showing in 2011 and that were featured in 2012’s Terraformer.
I’d read somewhere that Francisco Goya’s “The Colossus” paintings had influenced some of Roy’s more recent work, and wanted to ask him if the invocation was accurate. I did and didn’t get the chance. Roy’s expansive speaking style does not anticipate future questions as much as it renders them obsolete; his answers take a sort of elliptical orbit around a question, covering tangentially related subjects before returning to the territory initially inquired-upon. In just such a way he touches on Goya. “That colossus figure that shows up in all of those pieces started as a callback to Goya’s ‘The Colossus.’”
my senses are telling me one thing, culture is telling me something different, and investigations into the nature of reality are telling me a third thing.”
“He was using that colossus figure as a symbol for the kind of terror of the unknown and the seemingly infinite gulf of the abyss on the other side of the horizon. [The paintings] were being done by an artist who’d seen a lot of violence and a lot of political and social upheaval, [including] the French invasion of Spain. The scariest thing we could imagine was the authority figure rolling through the landscape and upheaving the lives of the powerless. I wanted to re-appropriate that colossus figure for a very contemporary set of anxieties. My inclusion of this giant dystopian figure started off really less as a symbol for the terror of the unknown and of violent upheaval and really more as a kind of [expression of] the impotence of the attempt to reconcile the conflict between the world that we’re building and the world that we’re destroying.” Perhaps the best way to read Roy’s appropriation of Goya is by looking at “The Colossus” alongside it’s dejected
counterpart, “The Giant.” The former exhibits awe-inspiring power, menace, implacability; the latter profound inner disturbance, his face twisted by its own silhouette, his mind collapsing under the weight of its own omnipotence. Roy is fascinated by a modernized version of that same paradox: Humans have an incredible capacity to reshape the world through technological progress, but is that brilliance and ingenuity transforming us, making us go blind to the ramifications of such a creative destruction?
Works from The New Me Is Already Old like “The Pasture” and “Scope for All Directions” have an immediate aesthetic appeal—subjects are painted in sharp, bright hues and possess an organic, almost primitive dynamism. But deeper intrigue lies in their philosophical underpinnings. These are men with polyhedrons, faceless busts, and mirror shards for faces. (Roy informs me that the geometric shape coming out of the head of the subject in “The Pasture” is an amplituhedron, a multidimensional structure used in quantum physics.) Despite (or because of) our daily sensory overloads, we are no longer able to access an objective world unfiltered by technological and scientific advancement and the ideologies and dogmas that build themselves around those advancements. As Roy puts it in his artist statement, “there is a way of cutting off the figures’ access to the world—to me that was the flipping point, it is a mask and you cannot see the face, but more importantly none of the figures can see out.”
Actually, it’s even more complicated than that. At this particular stage in his career, Roy is fascinated with the fragmentary nature of perception, its limitations and its longings. “There’s the world that I’m presented with through my senses, and then there are these expectations about what the larger world holds in terms of a metaphysical narrative that [is] presented to you as you develop and as you grow up… And then there’s the world that’s actually there, and the three of them sometimes overlap but oftentimes have nothing to do with each other. That series of paintings [The New Me Is Already Old] was an attempt to autobiographically make peace with the fact that my senses are telling me one thing, culture is telling me something different, and investigations into the nature of reality are telling me a third thing.” Cognition, neuropsychology, epistemology—it’s a far cry from the halcyon days of drawing inspiration from summer blockbusters and the kitschy glow of American cinema, but if Roy and his work convince you of anything, it’s that highbrow and lowbrow, science and art, perception and reality all have a point of connection, if only you can find it.
His most recent pieces and the lines of thinking that are currently preoccupying him are further explorations of perception, but also seem to aspire toward a sort of unified theory of science, art, and quantum reality. “Democritus After Giordano,” for example, refers to the Ancient Greek philosopher credited with formulating the atomic theory, and the seventeenth-century artist who painted a famous portrait of him. In “Democritus After Giordano,” Democritus’s holographic head is what Roy would call “non-spatiotemporal”—an object outside of space and time. It’s a fitting substance for a painting whose title specifically places a subject’s existence two millennia after his death. Mystifying as it may seem, it’s surprisingly appropriate for an artist enthralled by tearing down seemingly fixed boundaries, or in some cases peering straight through them.*
This article first appeared as the cover feature in Hi-Fructose Issue 37, which is long sold out. Like what we do? Get our latest issue as part of a new subscription to our print magazine here. Thanks!
