I first saw [Mark Tansey's] stuff when he was featured at Los Angeles County Museum of Art sometime in the '90s. I'd never heard of him and went to the museum that day just showing some friends around town. It was a real discovery kind of experience.
These really are fascinating paintings. I particularly like _Mount Sainte-Victoire_, with the figures of Baudrillard, Barthes and Derrida.
These paintings were featured in the LACMOA exhibit:
_Six Paintings of Mark Tansey_ (http://www.evl.uic.edu/davidson/CurrentProjects98/ET_VisualInfo/Mark_Tansey.html)
"His works directly challenge the critical assumptions that: (1) the historic nature of painting moves toward "flatness," (2) that its "proper" subject is the interaction of color and other optical "spaces," (3) that its only "proper" content is this very flatness and color display, (4) the underlying assumption that we do directly grasp the "true" outer world by our senses. This is understood in philosophic discourse as "naive realism". Critical acceptance of this position drove painting to pattern-making on oversized paintings that became progressively devoid of content or reference, and hence meaningless.
[For some reason, this site is full of typos. I corrected the ones from the above excerpt.]
(http://stategyforsuccess.com/unsub.php?e=ricardostarkey@aol.com&m=4031717)