Mr. Tichane states...
I construct my pieces with traditional materials, or mixed media in compatible techniques, so that the colors in the works, as well as the manner of their expression, can be preserved and maintained for viewers 400 to 500 years in the future. The pieces utilize the horizontal composition, indeed the typical shape, of landscape. Part of every image is a crepuscular, near black value juxtaposed with a lighter, saturated, and more lyrically hued surface, either in the upper or lower field. A full circle enters the dark or the chromatic plane. It appears variously as a radiant sun, a reflecting moon, a lambent gateway, or a receiving eye. There is a conscious attempt to invest this full circle with something of the immortal and the sprirtual quality that a halo used to evoke. And just as a shadowy tone opposes and balances a more vivid color across the support, so a continuous circle counteracts an equally limitless horizon in the paintings.
Currently, my work has expanded the above materials, composition, and imagery into a connected series of woodblock prints that use the impression of pared landscape as a poetic and visual metaphor for themes relating to AIDS. The suite and hand made book are entitled, "AIDS' Dark Terraine: Twelve Stations from a Yankee Pilgrim." I am that Yankee Pilgrim. The individual titles are as above.
I deliberately take my pieces beyond a modern context and engage a post-modern philosophy. First, modernism's triadic relationship between you as audience, myself as artist, and the artwork as creation is replaced by a diadic relationship. The artwork is at one pole, and you, the audience, are at the other. The artist is de-emphasized to near invisibility. Additional tenents of post-modernism that inform my work include clear-cut subject matter. The content of my artwork is about AIDS, the world's pre-eminent post-modern disease. A third anti-modern direction that my work uses is that these twelve multiples create an allegory, a many-leveled story in twelve parts that is a symbolic representation of the existence of AIDS. Allegory, unlike modern literary narrative, subverts a singular reading. A fourth post-modern idea inherent in my work is the search for a usable past. I look for and use transcendental, if not spiritual, signifiers that have an affinity with past art history. Signifiers call attention to the way in which language or visual systems organize, rather than label, experience and the world.
