Painting and drawing can be pursued, broadly speaking, in two directions: On one hand through the search for transformation and epiphany via experimentation, illusions, and aesthetics; on the other hand through a search for truth or dignity via decisive actions, bold statements, or by establishing systems of rules to adhere to.
Serendipity, accident, craft and what we used to refer to as talent are in the domain of the former. Conceptualism, anti-aesthetics and an appeal to logic, irony and intellectualism are associated with the later.
These two pursuits are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, some of the most interesting works merge both. (i.e., rules are made to be broken.) It may seem at times that merging opposites is destined to be a noble failure, but as they say, sometimes the road is more important than the destination.
My work is a synthesis of complexity and simplicity; extensible systems and flighty one-offs; bodies and minds upon which ramification and systems theory are applied.
Anatomy and biology play an important role but more as an example of a system of rules than a reference to any real creature or person. Anatomy, because it, like other medical systems, seek to disentangle, isolate and present a group of objects to define their relationships. Ramification, because it represents a persistent and irrevocable direction in science and human history: To dispel the great fallacy that nothing ever changes, and express the fact that everything is forever and persistently becoming increasingly complex.
My drawing are available through Ethan Pettit Contemporary Art, Fred Valentine Gallery and paintings are available at Saatchi Online.
The drawings could be rubbings from some alien fossil, or powdery carbon copies drawn out of some forgotten photomechanical process. Somewhere between language and life form, Egert draws these entities as discrete symbols, carefully conjoined with their negative spaces.
—Ethan Pettit, 2012