Andre Rene Epps Jr.

Lives and works in Atlanta, GA

Artist statement

Every canvas begins on a yellow-ochre ground, the colour the European painting tradition called "flesh," which Crayola sold under that name until 1962. I do not paint around that assumption. I build the figure on top of it, so the condition is already in the room before the person arrives. Wherever the paint thins, and at the seams, the ochre comes back up through the covering. The seams that look cut are painted. Nothing is collaged, adhered, or assembled. And the faces stay closed: nothing can be read straight off them, no expression to decode, no features to identify by. What a viewer gets instead is posture, costume, the weight of a look, and the colour that was already there. The closure is the subject, not a limitation of it. My first complete body of work, Everything They Didn't Tell Me, is ten paintings in four acts about the distance between what happened and what got written down. One was made from a service receipt at the auto shop where I work, the list of customers due to arrive that day. The receipt is not in the painting and its contents are not reproduced; that information is protected. The painting is what the document became once it could not be shown. I am self-taught. I came to painting from theatre and from years as a working musician, and I built this work around a full-time job. A second body of work, seventeen paintings across three scales, is in progress.

Artwork