Tomas Co

Artist Statement

My artistic journey is centered on the attempt to express ideas and inner feelings while navigating between nuance and hysteria in movements, positions, texture, dimension, and color. My approaches include painterly works and sculptural works, both strongly influenced by the minimalism afforded by the sumi-e philosophy. In the process, I found that gestural strokes in paintings and gestures in the sculptures provide an interesting and raw tension between the hidden and the exposed, both within the subject and within the artist. Moreover, the materials, texture, weight and time allow different approaches for me as an artist to communicate and negotiate with the physical world in the attempt to extract the invisible. My personal struggle is to find a place in which the banal, pretentious, and potentially cliched constructs in my works are sufficiently balanced with enough honesty, raw (even primal) aesthetics and personal attachments to make the art still worthwhile to make.