ANTHONY CUDAHY
Name: Anthony Cudahy
Age: 32
Home: New York, USA
Birthplace: Florida, USA
Discipline: Painting
Self-portrait after Hockney '83, 2021, oil on canvas, courtesy Semiose, Paris
What is the story behind your work?
Lately, I’ve been trying to compile a list of the first visceral experiences I had with color - The Horse of a Different Color in The Wizard of Oz is one of them. Another was trying to recreate a peachy orange hue that fascinated me. But it’s also not just a thing that is begun, it has to be continuously built. There are still moments that reify my love of the medium as much as those initial roots.
Who are the figures portrayed in your paintings?
Often, I think of my work as figurative, but not portraiture. However, even that distinction has become slippery for me, as I’ve increasingly used figures from my life in the paintings. From piece to piece this seems to shift. I paint my husband sometimes as he “is” (there are limits to the idea that a portrait can reveal the, or a truth about a sitter), and sometimes I paint him as a sort of actor fulling a role in an open-ended allegorical scene. That’s not always clean cut. Also, many of my figures exist in purgatorial spaces, and there’s often a conflict with notions of tenderness or closeness, joy and pain, between these characters. Painting is also so much about reference, always quoting and conversing with previous works. I think figurative work is something that any viewer projects upon endlessly. I want narrative and reference to exist in a generative place, where it doesn’t close down further meanings and inflections, but also isn’t just flexible cultural detritus.
Which artistic language do you use?
I think that painting is its own “language”. It’s intuitive in many ways and you also can actively learn it. That said, I’m often spending time thinking about other languages and mediums and trying to see what could be applied to paint. Exhibitions are all about pacing and a holistic consideration, so music and the album format is something I try to play offof.
How does your work reflect our current times?
My anxieties play out in the paintings and thoughts and fears are processed there. During COVID, the themes I was focused on were mirrored and exaggerated on a large scale. It probably goes with the fact that the climate crisis is the largest issue the world is facing - I’m sure it presses down and directs the work in some ways. As Eleanor Heartney writes in her book Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art, it’s nothing new to be obsessed with the End.
Wherein lies the beauty for you today?
Driving around the city today, I watched a fock of birds swirling in their patterns, alternating between tiny slivers and full silhouettes as they turned in the air. There’s a beauty to me in their relationship with the wind currents. There are communities of pigeon breeders in NYC who can tell by the plumage what rooftop a bird belongs to. Both the bigness of weather and the specificity of subculture remind me that my own day and concerns are teeny-tiny and there are millions of other experiences happening around me in tandem.
The photographer ii, 2021, oil on canvas, courtesy Semiose, photo A. Mole