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Do you ever wonder if turns toward despondency in painting are mere symptoms of the loss of modernist grandeur, of the castration complex sort, of fathers having handing down a impotent device for communing. Seed no longer fertile as the sadness painters endure. That Verne Dawson expectancy, a composition where something central and monumental has been lost. A lot of Attoe's paintings deal with this central space removed, or mountainous.
See too:
Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel