Bruce Thurman’s series of notebooks inhabit a world of storyboards and popular trash fiction. Thurman has crafted imaginary dossiers and archives, complete with binder rings, serving as evidence in the artist’s personal film noir. Each opened notebook reveals two randomly selected pages, containing quick sketches, magazine illustrations, personal notes, scribbled checklists, glossy portraits…the remains of an investigator’s day.
Bruce Thurman’s paintings trigger memories that were never really ours individually. Yet we seem to naturally make them our own: they belong to our collective consciousness, a dream-like universe of imaginary serials and thrillers haunted by beauties and beasts, sci-fi monsters and damsels in distress. A vision from another place and time, to be taken straight, no chaser.
Multiple and disparate images, graphics, scribbled lists and notations all vie with one another on the pages of Thurman’s handmade notebooks: the gritty, the profane, the refined, the referential, all subjects are reduced to equal status on these worn-thin working pages. They are modern diptych-miniatures (mixed media on wood), and with their movable pages and changing compositions, are able to combine with elements of many styles (trompe l’oeil, figuration, expressionism, minimalism, constructivism, to name a few…) in defining the artist’s personal narrative.
