NEW/NOW: Tony de los Reyes: Chasing Moby-Dick

Upcoming NEW/NOW artist Tony de los Reyes has spent the last decade visually interpreting and expanding on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He infuses the classic genre and narrative tradition of “history painting” with modern aesthetics, drawing on minimalism, abstraction, and a wide variety of media not merely to illustrate, but to “reconstruct the epic in a transitional space between literature, political history, and contemporary art.”

In constructing dramatic permutations of the text, de los Reyes creates a mythic vision of America and its enduring national obsessions, envisioning the same insatiable and self-destructive nature that defines Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Raw linen stained with sumi ink, pure black and white pigments, and sanguine red bister visually enhance the aura of bloodlust and violence in de los Reyes evocative and allegorical work.