Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by David Humphrey. Arms of the Law takes the police as its principal subject. Originally inspired by images seen on the television show Body Cam the work has expanded to embrace a variety of points of view, including confrontations between protesters and armed law enforcement officers. Humphrey applies his wide-ranging genre-mixing (abstraction, pop-surrealism and photo-derived representation) to the paradoxical challenge of making works with authority and power committed to questioning authority and power.
Authority’s gesture, the task of the violence worker (police), is to neutralize agency, to stop a person in their tracks; to arrest their ability to move. The cop’s task is to produce and distribute violence in the name of order; but the disorder that results often serves authority’s purpose just as well by “proving” the necessity for increased state violence. What kind of power can a painted image have? Like the police, a painting arrests motion, but in the service of poetic freedom. The application of an abstracting, formalized artifice can produce both a reflective distance for the viewer and an intense embodied presence that challenges detachment. A space is provided for sustained associative regard and a charged urgency. Some of these works fuse militarized police with neutralized citizens into a monstrous hybrid, a dynamic liquid whole in a space littered with trash and painterly affect.
