Grass Series (2)

Description

This image shows a grassy area that partially reveals crushed drink cans and the remains of an old-fashioned tricycle. Michael Economos's inclusion of detritus in this close-up landscape evokes a human presence, now vanished. The cans call to mind Andy Warhol's large-scale renditions of soup cans and Jasper Johns's replications of beer cans; yet unlike his Pop art forebears, who took objects out of their everyday contexts, Economos retains the natural world. In this picture plant life threatens to engulf the remnants of civilization. Indeed, as the title "Grass Series (2)" suggests, the vegetation is the main subject of this picture. While the painstaking verisimilitude suggests a debt to photography, the unnaturalistic grayish tonalities with silvery overtones, and the touches of white impasto to suggest highlights, stress the artist's interpretation of natural phenomena. The repetition of individual blades of grass, magnified, lends this realist image a decorative, almost hallucinatory quality.