PASCAL (People Against Skin Color And Love) is a pentaptych of fluid paintings that express the zeitgeist of current BLM (Black Lives Matter) struggle during Pride month – paralleling the latter’s origins as protests against police brutality and systemic discrimination of marginalized group.
The series of 12×12 canvases exploit the medium’s fluid dynamics as simultaneous process and metaphor of gender and sexual orientation via Pride flag colors; as well as the medium’s “cell” creation to evoke skin, with each of the 5 canvases representing a different skin tone.
At the same time, PASCAL comments on racism within LGBTQ community and narrative (hegemonized by well-to-do white gay male archetypes) as darker skin tones recede to the background behind the Pride colors, while lighter skin tones are in the foreground.
PASCAL is both an acronym (People Against Skin Color And Love), as well as a reference to Pascal’s law of pressure which states that a pressure change at any point (in a fluid) is transmitted such that the same change occurs everywhere. A metaphor for the spread of BLM protests across the globe, and of contemporary globalized activism.
Just as Renaissance paintings are imbued in the cosmic order, the dimensions of PASCAL harken to a better world order: 5 paintings – the number representing people/humanity, 6 Pride colors – the number representing Heart, 12 inch canvas – the number representing Completion.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 15/06/2020 (1st day of the Week of Juneteenth – which commemorates the ending of slavery in the USA)
