The rings in this canvas overlap and press against each other, the composition more crowded and pressurized than in the larger Spring Break works: faces and body fragments are visible through the gaps, plaid-patterned fabric appears within some rings, stars and hands are distributed throughout. Joy and disorientation arrive simultaneously, which is exactly the register of Florida spring break, the most frenzied instance of the American leisure dream, where the crowd is the experience and the individual survives it however they can.
The rings in this canvas overlap and press against each other, the composition more crowded and pressurized than in the larger Spring Break works: faces and body fragments are visible through the gaps, plaid-patterned fabric appears within some rings, stars and hands are distributed throughout. Joy and disorientation arrive simultaneously, which is exactly the register of Florida spring break, the most frenzied instance of the American leisure dream, where the crowd is the experience and the individual survives it however they can.
The density raises the question the series circles without answering: at what point does collective leisure become its own form of submersion? In Spring Break FL #2 it is no longer possible to find open water between the rings: they press together until the field is almost solid, the sea barely visible. The fragments of faces and plaid patterns through the gaps are the only evidence that individuals persist within the crowd.
The life rings press together until the field is almost solid, a recurring dominant form, protective and threatening at once, slightly absurd and slightly sinister, fragmentary images appearing through and around it: the same atmospheric logic Philip Guston achieved with his hooded figures. Guston’s hoods are historically loaded objects; Deceus’s rings are culturally loaded objects. The structural logic is the same: a form that is simultaneously protective and threatening, comic and grave, repeated until it becomes the atmosphere the other images must breathe through. The black-and-white barrier at the bottom marks the edge of the atmosphere. Below it, the street.
