Unruly Matter

It is late at night when my brother and I sit together while the rest of the house is asleep. Between two artists who share a lifetime, a conversation naturally becomes a Chautauqua, a discourse that unfolds as we attempt to dig up underlying truths from the things we have made while sitting in a room full of resin and drying oils.

Winner looks at the objects around him with a renewed, relentless curiosity. A sliced lemon resting in glass,
a ceramic pitcher, a bundle of dried stems, a blue mirror framing his own face. In another context, these are still lifes set up for quiet observation or formal copying. Instead, they have become immediate artifacts of
his domestic life, drawn from years engaged in fatherhood, experiences which do not come wrapped in an ikebana-like arrangement, but behave more like an overgrowth, spreading across memory like mold or mushrooms claiming new ground.

We speak of how a thought, once spoken, behaves very much like the medium he works with. You attempt
to contain it within a logical frame, but it leaks and swells past the edges.

In his paintings, oil builds into heavy, visceral ridges until the pigment threatens to swallow the very form it was meant to depict. Here is a split pomegranate, the thick brushwork smothering its surface while
preserving the glistening, fleshy interior beneath. Here is an earthen pitcher which continues to absorb and scatter light while it gasps under an accretion of paint. The artist’s intense, repetitive scrutiny of his works along with the urgent impulse to fix its form has created this heavy accumulation, and mastery lies in knowing when to yield, letting the medium breathe before the image collapses.

The resin sculptures translate the same tension into three dimensions. Taking casts of household items, Winner stacks replicas atop a cast of his own head, which acts as a fulcrum, bearing a burden that appears perpetually on the verge of tipping. Hardened trails of setting polymer and slip run down his temples like frozen streams, recording the exact moment gravity caught its motion in time.

Across both mediums, Winner wrestles with discipline and excess. The hand attempts to enforce a rational order, while the material obeys its own Newtonian laws of surface tension, load, and viscosity. When this
struggle resolves, it snaps the viewer out of any two-dimensional illusion. What remains is a hard-won
equilibrium, the undeniable presence of an object shaped by raw matter, time, and the human will.
As our talk winds down, the lines between the room, the artwork, and the conversation dissolve. A life
cannot be neatly arranged, nor can the material used to record it. The artist and the physical realm he lives in
really are all shifting, unruly systems. All that is left for us to do is finish our conversation, lean back, and
watch where the weight of the world settles.