LILY PRILLINGER

Safety-Kleen, 2000
Oil on canvas, triptych, 60 x 144 inches

The Safety-Kleen Corporation is an ubiquitous escort to Industrial Cleansing. Even at the Art Institute, the Safety-Kleen Brush Cleaner sits in silent mastery in the Painting Studios. Painters dip their most filth-encrusted, dried-up, odious brushes into its cavernous well of solvents and moments later, their brushes are miraculously purged of all oily scut. [An Artist's brush can be revived to its pristine form.] And the mysterious cleansing continues! The aloof "Safety-Kleen Man" makes his weekly rounds to various sites of toxic enterprise, and carts-off dense buckets of carcinogen-soaked rags-- remnants of volatile experiments are sent far away. Only a slight vapor-trail of their presence remains. The Safety-Kleen mission statement is "to collect, process, and dispose of an unlimited range of hazardous waste". Safety-Kleen is the chemo-therapist in a Ward spilling over with sickness. And one might argue that the Safety-Kleen 'process of purification' drowns toxicities with its own brand of chemical viciousness.

If only one's mind was as easy to clean. Memory, an inward canvas, is absorptive and expanding. Luminous stains and formless layers of toxic incidents leak without regulation. The Human Experience arouses colors and shapes as a reminder of itself. Even in sleep one is besieged by unconscious imagery. Surely, thoughts themselves are comprised of hazardous pigments. Indeed, my palette is never pristine. My body and mind are subject to the onslaught of nano-pigments, bleeding without compromise across my identity. To "think clearly" is a hindered task. The protean colors pollute, mask, and efface the very objects they cloak to reveal. [There are no Safety-Kleen products to handle this mess.]

And paint, a mixture of grease and pigment, extols the virtues of mess. Painting is a debauched discipline of the anti-disciplined: the unquiet, unconscious mind. Neuroses are evident across the terrain of a picture. 'Pure Color', 'Pure Form' are wishful misnomers as their application marks the very disturbance of 'a clean slate'. And so the discipline of painting is not unlike an interpretive gesture of one's own thoughts, ideas, and memories. At best, painting mimics or reveals the process and resolution of private thoughts/ ideologies. Some are beautifully unconscious. Some are hideous, exploded drawings. Some are awash with vagaries. But most are executed, in good faith.