THE DREAMLESS (GREEN KNIGHT)

Pepenardo has spent years working the fault line between art history and financial mythology, and THE DREAMLESS is his most compressed statement on that territory yet. The recumbent knight is one of Western painting's oldest figures: the effigy tomb, the exhausted soldier, the dreamer laid low. Pepenardo takes that figure and dresses it in the screen's green, the color that in contemporary markets means go, means safe, means profitable. In his hands it means none of those things. It means gone. The unconsciousness here is not defeat. It is something closer to total occupation. The knight has been so completely absorbed by the logic of the position that rest itself has become indistinguishable from vacancy. Pepenardo gives us a portrait of a mind that has dissolved into the system it was meant to be operating. THE DREAMLESS (GREEN KNIGHT) is offered at BMAG alongside its counterpart THE DREAMER (RED KNIGHT) as the inaugural Coup de Grace diptych event: two works, one auction, one collector. This is the kind of collecting moment that does not repeat itself.

Oil on linen. 39 x 39.5 inches. Unframed. Part of a diptych with THE DREAMER (RED KNIGHT). Ships from Nashville, TN. Framing, insurance, and international crating available on request. Condition report available to serious inquiries prior to purchase.