Visual Propaganda #6: Sedrick Chisom
Dedicated to the work of New York-based painter Sedrick Chisom
Sedrick Chisom and I have been friends for a few years now, after I first found myself fascinated by his paintings with their delirious colors, hallucinatory blends of abstraction and figuration, and hauntingly suggestive themes. Chisom, in many ways, is embodying of what can best be described as a contemporary symbolist painter. Having spent his last summer at the palace once owned by the Austrian painter and mystic Ernst Fuchs, Chisom’s connection to forces of the universe unseen is stronger than ever. This man, undoubtedly, has some fucking magic coursing through his veins…
He processes the cultural and political landscape in all its schizoid contradictions through mythological narrative tropes, giving the neoliberal grey of it all some much needed emotional heft and vibrant color. The treachery, violence, hypocrisy, and lunacy of the contemporary Western world are given their rightful place in a biblical struggle between good and evil. Chisom’s paintings don’t just display his gifted technique, but also an insightful worldview and a particular moralism that isn’t influenced by media or political parties or anything other than his own sense of self. As you can imagine, I appreciate that. Influenced by the likes of Afrofuturist speculative fiction writer Walter Mosley postmodern novelist Ishmael Reed, Chisom’s work addresses racial themes without the preachy, reductive, academic-brained ideas of so many of the artists of today, but instead develops narratives so far-reaching and surreal that these concepts tend to have a lampooning effect on the racial paranoia that saturates the art world and the broader left liberalism that the art world is embedded within. And with that, behold the work of Sedrick Chisom, another recruit into the ever growing Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde.
Artwork Titles
1. “The Occidental Tower The Capitol Citadel of The Alt-Rightland was Naturally Situated Over a Lake of Fire”
2. “The Woes of the Westward Kingdom were Such that the Angel Moroni Delivered A Dionysian Hero to the Daughters and Sons of the Southern Cross”
3. “An Altrightlander Contemplates Fourteen Words to Live by”
4. “Medusa's Covenant With The Lord of the Woods”
5. “Medusa Wandered the Wetlands of the Capital Citadel Undisturbed by Two Confederate Drifters Preoccupied by Poisonous Vapors that Stirred in the Night Air”
6. “A Blighted Calvaryman Patrolled the Valley of The Rocks on His Worn Out Horse Through Dead Mist at Miasmic Ass-crack Hours”