Atlanta artist André René Epps Jr. started one of the 10 paintings in his “Everything They Didn’t Tell Me” series on the back of a car dealership receipt, marking up the list of customers due that day in Sharpie between appointments, while he waited for the next car to pull in. The painting is called “Dead Riding Dead.” It is four feet by five. It has never hung in a gallery. Nor have the other nine paintings in the series it belongs to.
And Epps is on a mission to change that.
The self-taught artist came to painting sideways, by way of theatre training at Columbia College Chicago and years spent as a working musician. “Everything They Didn’t Tell Me” is his first complete body of work, painted over two years, around that full-time job at the Atlanta dealership, with no show lined up when he started and none lined up now. Epps has spent the better part of a year making the rounds, though. Lots of studio visits and curator conversations, collecting a mix of admiration — and rejection.
The reactions
Every canvas in the series starts with the same yellow-ochre wash background, a shade similar to what Crayola called “Flesh,” until 1962. For Epps, using the color is a rejection of the idea that one group or way of being is the standard. “Covering it is the argument,” he says.
One gallerist told him she admired what the paintings were investigating and felt connected to the questions, then passed, saying it wasn’t right for her program. A senior curator at a major museum sent him a long letter that included a denial. A curator in New York placed the work within a European tradition Epps says he’d never heard of, but didn’t offer space.
“There’s admiration available,” Epps said. “There just isn’t a room.” He has started pricing spaces to rent himself.
When the room appears, and Epps is certain it will, he already knows what it should feel like to walk through “Everything They Didn’t Tell Me.”
The work
The show itself, should it ever go up, is staged like a play — another carryover from his theatre days. Epps calls the sections “acts.” Act One, “Micro,” stays inside a single person’s head. Act Two, “Collision,” is where inner life and the outer world meet. Act Three, “Macro,” pulls back to systems: labor, the environment, power. Act Four, “Wisdom,” is one painting, the smallest canvas in the series.
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That shrinking is deliberate. “Hung in sequence, you walk a room that presses in and then releases, and the release is physically smaller than everything that caused it,” Epps says. “I want that experienced at the scale of a room, instead of explained in a wall text.”
For now, the room is his studio, 15 minutes from Midtown, 10 paintings under good light, waiting on someone willing to hang all of them, in order, and let the smallest one have the last word.
