David French’s paintings are steeped in the antitenets of post-Structural theory, specifically the deconstructive strategy of différance. Unlike those artists who slavishly reduce painting to a series of rhetorical simulacra, French demonstrates a much more playful intellect, owing more to Jacques Derrida’s linguistically slippery and semantically absurdest approach to philosophy than to the preordained dogma of post-Modernist gurus such as Jean Baudrillard. As a result, French’s witty image/text combinations attempt to mystify as much as clarify, fictionalize as well as rationalize. By deliberately

James Morris calls his paintings “American History Sublime,” advocating what he calls a “cynically optimistic” view in which doubt and reason grapple together, with at least some hope of transcendence. Morris’ early combinations of found images and narrative text were heavily influenced by the Art & Language group. However, these initial experiments quickly evolved during the mid ’80s into more ambiguous multiple-panel formats in which contradictory systems of visual language played out a form of stalemate, an uneasy duality between the idea of the sublime and the inevitable elusiveness of its