Tanner Simon’s paintings engulf the viewer in color and iconography that both challenges  and inundates the senses. Vacillation occurs due to the works’ large scale, intense color variations, and diverse representative styles. Conventional readings of the images and snap judgments are subdued as one contends with the vibratory nature of the works and their potential for meaning. 

His process is, as he says, “an absurdist approach” which includes beginning with MS Paint, the digital drawing software, and ending with large-scale oil paintings. These works are meticulously planned from beginning to end but do not reveal this fact simply by being perceived. The voracity with which they are made shines in the collision of realism and simple flattened forms, color fields vibrating against one another, and disparate representations that seemingly may not belong together. Simon is interested in the gradient of information that we are bombarded with but also that exists from idea through process to execution and finality. This gradation is evident in the final work, but is at times latent, as Simon plays with reductionism throughout the process. We do not see the gradation but rather sense it in our confrontation with the object phenomenologically. One may see early computer graphics, child-like expression, or the nature of masking and hiding, but upon further

inspection, one may perceive small details unnoticed at a distance and previous marks that eke through the glazed surface of the canvas.

The icons that the viewer is confronted with are devilish, cartoonish, funny, strange, sweet, and silly but ultimately trigger what Simon calls an “Iconography of desire and disgust.” It is this, along with the artist’s process, that tell the viewer Simon is examining the hierarchy of things: history, low and high culture, heroic and the everyday, well-trodden and originality, and so on. Thus, in the end the relationship between the viewer and the painting is charged with issues of representation, power, and meaning. The viewer carries this when they leave, whether they realize it or not.

- Colin Edington

Tanner Simon’s paintings explore familiar visual tropes through the use of heroic scale and parodies of power.  While not overtly political, Simon's work seeks to re-contextualize cultural truisms and common knowledge into icons of significance. His work is inspired by imagery created using MS paint and 3-D modeling softwares, often utilizing intensely flat fields of color and smooth renderings that evoke early internet meme culture. His use of strategic formal decisions and playfully vibrant colors fixes otherwise mutable subjects and imbues them with a bombastic presence. Simon's paintings assert their physicality through their scale and placement within space, forging a dynamic relationship with the viewer and questioning preconceived notions of their relationship with issues of representation, power, and meaning.