The Cast Paintings are made by constructing a monochrome painting, making a mold of the sides and back of it, and then pouring a series of casts from that mold. The castings are made of polyurethane plastic, tinted with pigments, which is mixed like paint.

These paintings reflect the abstraction of contemporary life. They are an abstraction of abstract painting. By the extreme position that these works take to “objectify” painting, they equate paintings to everyday objects. This focuses on paintings as objects with meaning in themselves instead of as blank objects used as a writing surface for pictures and comments.

The painting's method of construction relates to mass-produced consumer culture and our comfort with that today. Advertising, marketing and commodities are defining features of our age; and the process and materials of these paintings relate to those issues while still reflecting an artist’s need to create original objects. I am always searching for something that appears simple and effortless, but captures our situation more precisely.

I consciously try to promote paradoxes within the work such as hand-made v. mechanically produced, high art v. commodity, and original v. fake. I believe that the uncertainty of what is real and what is “fake” in the paintings actually enhances the spiritual quality of the work. Monochrome paintings typically embody a spiritual quality by forcing all of the questions back on the viewer to create an intimate, contemplative experience. The same reaction is promoted by making the viewer contemplate details which would not be considered if the paintings utilized a more traditional support.

In the end, I want the work to raise the mundane to the heroic. I don't intend to be ironic, but instead to compare art to our present day culture. The paintings ask whether we can obtain a grand spirituality in the objects being produced now, both in art and industry.

Mark Cole 2005