erek Buckner utilizes a variety of sources for his paintings – video imagery of urban landscapes taken from airplanes and moving cars, models of dystopias constructed in the studio, and most recently, piles upon piles of ubiquitous marshmallows. What connects Buckner's past works – American Perspectives, The UFO series, and now his latest Marshmallow Series-- is a focus on density and proliferation.

Multi-level highways spanning indeterminate miles, details of monolithic overpasses, suburban wastelands rendered ominously from a birds eye perspective, rows of buildings, automobiles, concrete. In Buckner’s paintings the constructed environment has subsumed nature and there is little room for anything other than expansion. Discomfort seems to predominate over the possibility of connectedness and the environment--both rendered and inferred-- is unreservedly hostile. And yet, amidst all of this hostility and tension, there persists an undeniable—even exalted—beauty.

Buckner admits to a childhood fear of nuclear devastation and also refers to modern anxieties – surveillance, loss of control--which are evidenced in his paintings not only via a sense of claustrophobia, but also through the inclusion of threatening elements- circling planes, distant UFO's. In the Marshmallow Series the intensity of this inquiry has remained, yet it has shifted to a more abstract and ambiguous subject. These paintings of tumbling heaps of pink and white and white on white are simultaneously humorous, somewhat grotesque and—again—somehow beautiful. They expertly explore the subtlety of amorphous form, and yet the suggestion of this limitless gelatinous substance is also overwhelming, even sickening.

It is his ability to move fluidly between beauty and anxiety that distinguishes Derek Buckner as a painter; with each new series his work continues to confound and compel.