DIMIN is excited to present The Transfiguration of the Comedian, a series of ten paintings by artistic polymath Adam Green. Green is a world-maker, a reality-inventor, and his Comedian comes to us from a deep and eclectic well of material including essays, graphic novels and films created by the artist. Presenting ten cross-sections of this deity, The Comedian is rendered through various dimensions and psychic planes, showing the many ways this entity can be viewed.
In 2019, Adam Green released War and Paradise, a graphic novel combining his lyrical and visual vocabulary. In what he calls “Regular World”, Green builds out a universe ruled by deities called “Regu-Lords”, one of which is the Comedian. The Comedian is hybrid of artificial intelligence and a Demiurge, a lesser divine figure from Gnosticism that shaped material reality. Green’s interest in A.I. comes from its unique ability to instantly hybridize materials. As Green explains in in his recent essay Constellations of the Art Mechanism; “With no spirit guiding the hybridization, and no ego glue to bind the materials, the A.I. productions leave us cold and conscious of their meaninglessness”. Because of his nature, the Comedian stands at the center of hybridization question, a god of novelty and yet cannot create anything new. Instead, the Comedian reanimates in several forms, sometimes as a Wizard of Oz-type character, or even as a criminal in an Inquisition trial plucked from Green’s poem movie MDVL: 1,000 Years of Dark Ages.
These worlds are Adam Green's place of creation, where he attempts to create a “work of total art”. Indeed, this creative motivation extends across his practices, including painting, sculpture, writing and music. For The Transfiguration of the Comedian, Green utilizes his invented alphabet of symbols inspired by deconstructed cartoon characters. With this alphabet he calls “Houseface”, he aims to construct multiple layers of information by using coded symbols as the foundation. Stylistically his work is precise and hand-crafted, infusing pop with a sense of mysticism that branches to layers, depths, and axes. Borrowing from the world of cartoons and video game characters, Green plays with the most basic graphic elements like the body parts of Mickey Mouse or Mario’s pixelated form as seen in War and Paradise. He constructs scenarios and locations to incorporate little stories into the two-dimensional pictures he illustrates. Likewise, scenarios can emerge from the paintings and become “real-life”.
As Green explains; “Artists are dam builders, trying to divert a body of flow out of their soul through various adjustments. Artworks function as sculptural medicine while helping us to wrestle with the moral logic of our dreams”. In observing such a thorough dissection of the Comedian, his secrets and origins, the viewer is carried away by what Green calls the “Mindwheel”. Harnessing this “engine of repetition connected to the force of art”, Adam Green positions himself as both artist and creator in an attempt to explain his own creative genesis of world making.
Adam Green (b. 1981) is a songwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, and poet. A co-founder of The Moldy Peaches and author of eleven solo-albums, his songs have been performed by artists as diverse as The Libertines, Carla Bruni, Kelly Willis, Dean & Britta, and Will Oldham. Green’s paintings and sculptures have been the subject of exhibitions in America, Asia and Europe, including a 2016 show at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. He wrote and directed the first feature film shot entirely on an iPhone, The Wrong Ferarri (2010), and Adam Green's Aladdin (2016), which Buzzfeed.com described as “the trippiest movie ever made." In recent years, Green has authored a series of graphic novels and poetry books.
Announced October 2023, the album Moping in Style: A Tribute to Adam Green features cover versions of Green’s songs by Regina Spektor, Father John Misty, Frankie Cosmos, Devendra Banhart, Sean Ono Lennon, among others.