The Lorenzetti Project  takes its initial inspiration from paintings of 14^th century Siena, particularly Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “Crocifisso.” In that painting’s subject matter, its ‘transcendent’ category, combined with varying stages of disintegration competing with time (the fading of imagery, loss of originally rendered parts, effects of packing, storing, shipping, etc.) is where my attention first began to merge with those very early discoveries in extraordinary paint application (applicable to diverse worlds), ‘destinations,’ and contemporary responses and possibilities.

   To bring history forward, but still in contemplation of ‘distancing’ times and places, for expanding an ‘art historical overview,’ is something I’ve worked with before. Mentally compartmentalized, most painters carry around various forerunners, favorites, placeholders, and renovators, as either conscious or unconscious traces or feeds to their own work, their own place and time, re-imagining, rearticulating, juxtaposing events particularized in art-making. These activities bring up such questions as ‘timeless art’ and the ‘conversations’ between painters, periods, techniques, that are markedly or soto voce unfixed but important for our contemporary thought processes.

     Most of the Lorenzetti Project paintings are connected to wood panel backing or shipping crates. Some have begun to select various artifacts or other modes to juxtapose with themselves and each other, such as the “Lorenzetti Triptych” utilizing a saint’s clothing and setting of 15^th to 16th century Florence, with the current Mexican sculptor Santiago’s “Immigrantes,” with silk dolls from George Washington’s archives. Fourth is an abstract of ferns and bones, the ‘body’ is vellum (skin from an unborn animal). Each link follows the voice of the Project. And the language of each segment follows fairly correctly from its origin, showing textural, color, intent and ‘ideal’ differences, but subtly converting size-position from the original in each case to fall into the integrative realm of this triptych (four panels).The combination is unexpected, the examples are often under-appreciated. ‘Unexpected’ and ‘under-appreciated’ are one axis in this Project.

     Another hinge or axis is Lorenzetti’s religiosity that translates into today’s spirituality or else seeks to recondition the familiar “loss of soul,” unfulfilling ironies, or divestment of meaning, that seek revival in many current art works by way of complexities, fusions, fantasy reordering, brilliance of ‘skins’ or pearly over-painting, patterning, gilding, importations, translucencies or luminescence. The surface is celebrated, painting returns to the concept of excellence, advances into new modes of consciousness.

     The last is presented in “MATRIX” as the human-dehumanized or ‘sacrosanct accused’ that, cocooned, passes into a kind of rest or fruition, just as “X-radiograph” becomes a monument such as that depicted in Tiananmen Square, facing off the statue of Mao. These pieces can be read and re-read by way of the inadvertent and perpetual (guilt, representative form, instances of decoding, the past’s deified sign) and the questions brought forward by the Lorenzetti Project dealing with life-death, the finite and infinite, time and place. The final form offers intensity and sacrifice, both connected to motion.