STUDIO JOURNAL WITH DEAN MONOGENIS
The dog days of summer are a great time to interact with art in studios. There is a certain benumbed calm about the interim period between one art season and the next. I was in the studio of Dean Monogenis on Thursday, August 6, and it was refreshing. Dean has a smallish studio in the downstairs of his East Williamsburg apartment. Works in progress and recently finished ones, left hanging just before a recent trip to attend openings in Los Angeles and Madrid, were in evidence. There were five paintings on view, enough to generate a lively discussion lasting nearly two hours. Monogenis' primary subject over time has been architecture manifested as metaphysical and phenomenological space. Over the years it has gestated and morphed into an engagement with how to recreate that space in a means that people can understand without relying on painterly abstraction. It has become a sort of standard to replace gestural tropes with detailed, organizational ones, and t