In this new series of hybrid sculptural paintings, Gronquist’s idiosyncratic gestural marks flirt with the protocols of classical Abstract Expressionism even while each painting’s rough, undulating surface topology appears to erupt from the flatness of the picture plane, only to finally coalesce like strange sedimentary deposits left behind by some unknown geological event of mythic, galvanic proportions.

In Gronquist’s imaginative formulation, each hard, shell-like carapace, resting on serene color-fields of milk-gold and blooming pink, illustrate the artist’s obsessive, ritualistic manipulation of materials over the course of months in the studio. The entire painting becomes a kind of “psychic tundra,” not dissimilar to the process of a traumatic wound being slowly absorbed and repressed by the mind / body in order for one to continue to function.

Since the beginning of his career, Gronquist has been interested in investigating the very nature and meaning of the “paint stroke” itself, questioning the purity of a single flourish of paint intuitively applied by a skilled, trained hand and guided by a sense of manual dexterity innate to the artist himself. Wood, plexiglass, resin, powder pigment, polyurethane, atomized vinyl records, silver nitrate, salvaged paper from telephone poles, rain, acrylic, ash, squid ink, thick oil, quartz paint, satin, felt, wool, and lace are all subjected to a regime of creative destruction and phase change: smashed, pulverized, atomized, melted, liquified, scorched, and then mystically recombined by Gronquist himself into an alchemical substrate whose “base elements” magically transcend the sum of their constituent parts.