By Josh Baptista
Dean Monongenis is showing new paintings in High Rise Vista
at Chelsea's Stux Gallery. The first thing that attracted me to the
paintings was an unbelievable amount of craft and flawless execution
of the paint. The craft has been painstakingly mastered through years
of practice. The painting brings together the ideas of fantasy with
the realm of reality. They bring the urban element of structure as
well as incorporating mountains and pieces of green landscape.
Dean Monogenis paintings question the ideas of permanence in
the structures around us. In Another Residential Fantasy Dean begins
to ask questions about the wants and needs of a location in a home.
We all want our space and privacy but to be close enough to Starbucks
and our favorite department stores. It becomes a deconstruction of
the urbanization as these structures invade spaces of secluded homes
in nature. He provides clever imagery as escalators that lead us into
digital structures of the doom and eventually leave us on the edge of
a cliff.
The show as a whole is a glimpse into a world of what maybe
our future landscape. Through technology and process, these paintings
become beautiful and slick. If you cannot appreciate the concept, you
can definitely find something desirable in the quality of the craft.
In the end I left with more questions than answers. Is the
current state of our living condition sustainable in our environment?
Is the architecture around us formatted for future weather conditions?
Is convenience the end of privacy? These are the questions I find
myself asking in Dean Monogenis's work.
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