Within Mullins’s compositions richly painted animals and portioned figures become metaphors for the intricacies of the human condition. Mullins skillfully locates moments when sentiments, that are assumed polar opposites, become intertwined. His luscious paintings make contemporary references th... Read more
Within Mullins’s compositions richly painted animals and portioned figures become metaphors for the intricacies of the human condition. Mullins skillfully locates moments when sentiments, that are assumed polar opposites, become intertwined. His luscious paintings make contemporary references that complicate his pictorial content and gesticulated technique. To paraphrase the artist, such contexts emerge from the “base behaviors” of human beings, which evidence a connection to other animals.
The footballer’s crotch is one reoccurring subject in this body of work. Cropped to only depict shorts with centered creases of latent masculinity, it’s a sight that more than flirts with the homoerotic. The image vacillates between the two extremes demarcated by society; however, Mullins considers homoeroticism and masculinity as inherently connected. Tensions between other assumed extremes inform the references that the artist makes to the real. In other renderings, his crude subjects are placed side by side with fragile and dainty imagery. Through representation, which the artist maintains “has to be held onto”, Mullins makes monuments to that which is observed, through means that would be accessible to most -and in his words “would fly back home”—home being West Virginia. It is Mullins’s particular means of representation, highly-selective within obfuscated contexts, that infinitely complicates the work beyond that which is represented.
