"Amidst the jokes and commercial messages in his work, Pittman addresses society in a serious way, alluding to the difficulty of attaining happiness and the centrality of desire to human existence. As critic Francesco Bonami has written, "Pittman tells us a story of a society where religion, gender, race, sexuality, and economics overlap, entangle, and clash to jeopardize the democratic background that allowed them to exist in the first place.", daqui.
"His new paintings are guided by a set of brackets or sensibilities, as he alternately calls them: spring and fall; the notion of secular religious paintings; and poetic terminologies for semiabstract forms of longing. He offers tristesse as an example. “Also pavane...fado...and saeta, which is a type of very emotional, passionate gypsy song. Saudade—a beautiful word, Portuguese—is a kind of induced sentimentality and longing, a nostalgia for events of the past.”
Lastly, and perhaps relating to saudade, Pittman says he was thinking as he worked of what the world might have looked like before cognitive language was established. He recalls a primal memory of his own infancy, lying on green carpet and looking up at a small pleated lampshade glowing with light. This is a perfect example of the kind of tension driving his work: the world of seen things, but seen as an elemental experience of deep psychoanalytic formation.
(daqui)
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