The new painting and sculptural series “Water is the Master Verb” by Atlanta-based artist, David D’Agostino, reflects the ambivalence of nature, as symbolized by unbounded water, toward humankind. Attempting to respond to the broken levees, D’Agostino celebrates and simultaneously mourns the resurrection of nature where once social and physical structures dominated the landscape

“The work empowers a sense of irredeemable loss and how profoundly indifferent nature is toward tragedy,” said D’Agostino. “My daughter attends school in New Orleans and so I had to deal with her emotional displacement and readjustment. When I first returned to the city I sensed her anxieties were visually communicated by all of the twisted destruction I could see everywhere in front of me. The water had drowned her soul and she is only now recovering.”

‘Water is the Master Verb” contains troubling, gorgeous, emphatically bittersweet productions which mix up the pros and cons of mortality. The paintings, presented as triptychs and polyptychs, murmur the extreme echoes of chaos and order, and each extreme hangs upon the existence of its other.

“I did not lose anything from the disaster, and therefore my personal story is distant from the truth of those who suffered genuine loss. Yet, like a writer who creates his fictions, I am depicting my own poetry, my own response grounded in the dual nature of death and resurrection.

Dagostino’s work can power down with almost troubling ease to behave as deadpan décor. Full of juxtapositions, the paintings are the result of quick photography sessions with my daughter in the Ninth Ward, drawings of weeds taking over abandoned structures, and a metaphorical desire for healing.

“I want New Orleans to once again find itself, but I have no idea what that really means,” said D’Agostino. “I can only continue to return, like an excavator searching the caves of Pompeii for some trickle of meaning.”