John Denniston II uses oil paint to improvise within realistic picture-making structures. By staging scenes of chaotic abstraction from classic formulas, he challenges the ideological implications founded in historic painting practices, opening within them a surreal scene of figural possibilities. In taking on the discourses of philosophy and anthropology with an artist’s introspection and imagination, he pressures the ability of paint to evoke the conceptual out of the formal, generates new commentaries, and lightens the weight of burdensome logic.