GORDON: I understand that some of your subjects have been close family members, others are friends, and often patients whose families have given permission to have their loved ones painted.

MIÑÁN FITZGERALD: Right. Also, my personal experience with Kawasaki disease spending four months in and out of medical facilities was at the age of 13 years old. I have a memory of the time connected to machines in a Seattle hospital and being told that the doctors were not sure if I was going to live or die. These kind of hospitalization scenarios and near-death experiences eventually became prominent themes in my work.

Providing more detailed information about each patient in the paintings would invite context from outside the work that ultimately detracts from an open‑ended response. The paintings have to carry their own weight and not depend on the power of a backstory or documentary description. I do not publicly differentiate between references because it takes away from the theatre of the paintings.

By theatre, do you mean in relation to narrative?

Not exactly. I spent some time studying the work of Artemesia Gentileschi at both the Capodimonte Museum in Naples and then more recently at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She stages a painting in such a manner as to invoke a sort of impending trauma. The best way to describe this is perhaps to say I’m seeking the antithesis of what her use of tenebrism brings to an image — an open psychological state that transcends the subject matter rather than being subjugated by it.

You’ve spent over a decade exploring the salvific function of technology in relation to human suffering.

Yes, it was roughly ten years ago when I encountered Thomas Eakins’ paintings Gross and Agnew Clinic newly restored at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Those works are acclaimed for their documentation of technological and hygienic advancements. I was also reading Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic about how the development of medical perception during the late 1800s transi­tioned from its alchemic roots to a process of exact science. It was quite fascinating. We seem to be living in a similar predicament right now — a societal limbo of sorts in regards to our anxiety about life‑extension technologies. The rich space between video and painting offers opportunities to engage these anxieties.

I see this in connection with keyframing in your video work by essentially locating a frame as a portal or cinematic transition. What led you to paint people in transition so to speak, on life-support?

I started the ICU paintings when numerous family members of mine were passing away within a short period. In 2009, my wife and I visited her grandfather within a week of his passing. It seemed appropriate to put aside whatever work I was making at the time and create a water­color portrait of him. It was not about remembering him in a particular way, but rather to amplify his right to be valued at the end of his life.

Watercolor is a paint you can control only to a degree and the real poignancy is in guiding the stains that convey an inherent fragility through their unsubstantial surface and tendency to fade. There’s an analogous metaphor here in addition to the fading as a connotation of our vulnerability — the situational adversity depicted in the paintings most often arises from circumstances outside the person’s control, and the meaning or beauty is achieved from suffering wisely, suffering while retaining your dignity.

Francisco Goya comes to mind as a portraitist who used confrontational painting to grapple with suffering.

Goya’s Third of May 1808 is certainly one of the strongest paint­ings to grapple with humanity’s courage in the face of death. Not to mention Rembrandt’s weighty self-portraits when he had lost his entire family and the history of paintings depicting martyrs like Saint Sebastian and the Via Dolorosa of Christ. While these legendary figures are certainly powerful, I’m more interested in painting people who are not so entrapped by mythology and are relatable as your own mother or brother, sibling, or friend.

The passing of my grandfather was followed by the death of my only brother, then my uncle and cousins. It was a traumatic period of time in my life. On the other hand, my daughter and son were born during the same time frame, so there was simultaneously a sense of hope. The title of the current exhibition Rebirth is a reflection on this dichotomy.

Let’s talk about your painting process, specifically reproducing some of your watercolors on a monumental scale.

The large paintings are almost altogether foreign to the small water­colors. I wouldn’t call them reproductions in any strict sense of the word; each one becomes an entirely new puzzle to work through. My process is straightforward at first, beginning with a projection of the small watercolor as a map of the original marks. But once I finish that initial layer of paint, I abandon any kind of mechanical approach for something completely different. The individual nonsensical marks of the watercolor become continents of information to unpack and my goal is then to imbue those marks with even more autonomy while somehow retaining the integrity of the overall image. The small watercolor paintings are executed with a direct and uncumbered formality, whereas the large oil paintings are indirect and mediated.

So how does this process relate to the content of your work?

If you think of it in terms of metaphor, for me the apparent brevity in watercolor application is analogous to our tendency to forget pain so quickly. The large paintings solidify those faint memories as moments to confront and deal with. It’s the challenge of not just the recognizable image on a small scale, or the paint working as pure abstraction on a colossal scale. Each large painting must read with a time-delay in relation to the gestalt. At first it is difficult to identify recognizable imagery and by the time it coalesces, you’ve already opened yourself to a new experience. Controlling that rate of tran­sition within the still image of a painting is the greatest challenge.

When do you know you’ve succeeded?

There seems to exist a visual space that can to trigger a psycholog­ical space. Moments of disorientation access this space in the video work. In the paintings, it is once the work coheres as a picture and immediately collapses back into autonomous marks; a perpetual oscillation between the individual painterly passages and the overall image. As an analogy, we cannot entirely make sense or extract meaning from the dire situations depicted; there is always a gap between what we know as the image — the situation, and the known that we always face as our limit — our mortality.

You seem to employ titles as a poetic buffer against death or perhaps a form of terror management.

The titles are meant to further the painting’s invitation to reflect on our individual response to suffering. Our complexity as human beings demands as many tools as possible to shape our language of how to make intellectual and emotional sense of end-of-life expe­riences. There’s interesting research showing that many patients of chronic, progressive, and life-threatening illnesses find more hope in divine intervention than in the promise of a technological or medical cure. This is an actual tension and phenomenon of experience that needs to be contested with, not ignored or laminated with scientism.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on paintings of patients with severe complications from COVID-19. Our current pandemic has saturated the public consciousness and a relative of mine was recently diagnosed positive, so I have a personal place to start.