Painting is for me an act of social dreaming, a way to visualize queer and anticapitalist forms of relationality. My work imagines a world in which people are free to play. The figures in my portraits redirect all the fierce energy that we typically devote to wage labor into whimsical athletic pursuits and joyous group bonding. With inviting color palettes and eccentric human forms, my portraits are attempts to renew the nineteenth-century leisure painting and twentieth-century sports painting for our time. In my works, with bodies fiercely in motion and blissfully at rest, the theme of recreation is not co-opted for ruling-class or nationalist ideologies, but instead tapped for its complex affect and formal possibilities.
@faysanders_
