"Sheeple" explores the resurgence of the survivalist world-view and it's manifestation in today's egalitarian or "green" culture as a form of pathological mediocrity and stereotypy. It reflects a fixated pursuit of happiness spurred by a deep, self-fulfilling fear of annihilation that requires us to "fit-in" or die. My imagery depicts the perverse giddiness of self-gratification in the face of self-destruction. The "sheeple" of the world are still following each other to collect their 'food pellets', penned in by an electric fence of perceived obligation and political rhetoric. Looking around, the cloning of the human was done a long time ago, and not surprisingly scientists initiated the current process with a sheep.

"Verbicky doesn't hide the message he wishes to convey to us through these images; simply by calling his new series of representational paintings "Sheeple," he is clearly signaling his criticism of the unthinking responses - the habits - we indulge ourselves in as participants in mass consumerism. As the artist writes, "My imagery is intended to depict the perverse giddiness of self-gratification in the face of self-destruction. The 'Sheeple' of the world are still, through all our advances, following each other to collect their food pellets, penned in by an electric fence of perceived and ingrained obligation and political rhetoric." Verbicky does not delight in the "visual culture" of consumerism, as did the original Pop artists, but regards it with alarm, despair, and no little fury. He sees it - and employs it - as a symptom of our uncritical, self-debasing collusion in a wasteful, bread-and-circuses civilization, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in which the spectacle is that of us in the feverish and abject process of consuming.

But there is an almost lyrical poetry to these images in the way Verbicky has appropriated and modified them. They remain mysterious, despite his social message, because they transcend that message. Their obliquely familiar images leave us uneasy, but also leave us vaguely enchanted. These paintings are not lectures or sermons on the evils of mindless consumption, but are stories - novels, perhaps - told about those who consume and, more specifically, those who are consumed by the need to consume. Although never glorious, their fate is not always dire, and their plight can be droll rather than simply pitiable. James Verbicky is a painter of strange comedy, not pathetic tragedy, and his outlook - as, indeed, his commitment to making art itself - is, finally, optimistic. Our present condition could be worse, he reasons, and, thus, it can be better. Art, Verbicky further demonstrates, can alert us to the possibility, and the urgency, of that betterment."-Peter Frank. JAMES VERBICKY: SHEEPLE MAY SAFELY GRAZE

"Verbicky's earlier abstractions studiously avoided referring to anything. They could evoke elements and events, and shapes in them might bristle with suggestivity, but they finally insisted on their physical and visual autonomy, claiming to represent nothing but the artist's inner ideas and feelings. It's only now that, without losing the intensity of those inner impulses, Verbicky allows his work to engage methods and references that push it into the realm of - well, not the familiar so much as the known. His new abstract paintings are no less abstract for their atmosphere, for their light and nuance, for their persuasive glower in black and white; whether their surfaces have been resined or left raw; whether the extravagance of brushstrokes evocation of space and time; in the final analysis, he is painting paintings, not pictures. But, whether they brim with color or that comprises each of them directs the eye into the painting or bounces it all over - Verbicky's abstractions now breathe the same air we breathe and, dare I say it, watch the same sunsets. These paintings are not landscapes in great part because they are not places. They do not depict, and are not even dependent on, any given view of any given spot on the earth. Indeed, in the way they vary from one another in structure, light, color, and spatial evocation, they betray the fact that the painter has invented them, forging them out of the process of painting rather than out of a process of looking at something else." -Peter Frank

James Verbicky's work will inspire, provoke, engage and mesmerize.