Daniel Tierney "Ghost Hesh"

Daniel Tierney's paintings come to life through a series of chess moves in which you can sense the young artist feverishly trying to outwit the dead hand of abstract painting and it's surrounding thrones of antecedents and consequents. Here there is no one set of rules but sets of simultaneously existing possibilities that come and go as they please inventing themselves and their enemies without any need for agreement between them.

These works are boundlessly ambitious, romantic quests to colonize new pictorial space in the outsized tradition of American post war painting. In these theatrical pictures, the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, real life and the virtual world, are rendered marginalia as the luridly-colored situations liquify and transform like quicksilver from architecture to cinema to sculpture.

Photography is always present in Tierney's painting, either buried or above ground, as a structuring element or as the faint echo of technological residue. It forms the necessary stop-action counterpoint to the artist's close identification with the gestural a la prima mark-making of the abstract expressionists. Digital images, projection, animation and just about anything else you can think of make up the source material for these works. Acrylic paint, foam brushes and a spray gun are the media. The run-up to the finished works can be a long bumpy road. Bridges between the landscape of a thousand video games and the apse of a Baroque church are often built and burned several times. But even with the slow-distilled presence of so much architecture and still life, in the end, Tierney paints it up quickly with darting and intuitive decisions to a place where things rarely feel static or safe.

"I usually think it's done when I look at the thing and I know that anything else I do to it will ruin it, said Tierney in a recent interview on Fecalface.com. "That's when I usually do something else to it and ruin it. Then I work on it some more and coax it back from the very uncomfortable, hideous place to somewhere new."

While Tierney's paintings seem to disclose the building block process that gave rise to them, they are also an epilogue to that process, and finally a mystery. Like the lunar module after separation from the Saturn Five rockets that blasted it from the atmosphere into deep space, they float off into a dark place for an uncertain embrace with the viewer, before drifting away to unknown destinations or falling back to land.

"[My paintings] are more than likely … some sort of Frankenstein where the ideas that run through [them] take new form and sort of stagger into the woods. From there I just chase after [them] hurling chunks of butter and hope the fat kid takes the bait."

Dan Tierney holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art institute. He has had one person shows at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and at the Ping Pong Gallery. This is his first one-person show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts.