Kevin Michael Runyon has spent much of his life in and around Baltimore, Maryland, and he currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. Initially working in the field of digital photography and film, Kevin also has a background in graphic design. His paintings are a geometric nod to cheap patterns; with its Day-Glo pigments and odd color combinations, overlapping painting windows, and a very painterly sensibility, Runyon creates a cross between wallpaper, op art, and the drippy bodily abstraction of midcentury. His work is inherently campy in that body politics, it’s blatant use of color combinations that question good taste in painting, and have the size and presence of traditional Abstract Expressionist images.
Reacting to the aesthetics of the Neo-Geo art movement and challenging the role of the painter in the wake of vector based digital design, Kevin Michael Runyon uses paint as a material device to activate illusory space, creating work that engages a viewer and directs them both through and to the surface of the composition. Interested in the use of patterns with a non-authored and casual context and utilizing specific vibrational color relationships, Kevin seeks to activate physical and optical reactions to his work, while referencing a conceptual space.