From M. Jessica Rowe

Despite their simplicity, Madai Taylor's paintings are challenging works of art. The spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity, that characterizes many of these expressionistic works veil their visual and conceptual rigor.

His use of line is emotive and shows a fluidity gained from a lengthy practice of painting. With confidence and bravado, he takes the notion of mood and elevates it to the point of refined visual harmony.

Muted tonalities effortlessly flow from dramatic to mysterious. A remarkably rich-spectrum of warm black, brown, and red oxide hues is gleaned from different mineral constituents: the silt and clay is from different parts of the North and South Americas.

With this unique mixture of sifted dirt and gesso, the artist draws with, incises lines into, and builds and wipes away layers of pigment. The buoyant surface is gestural and abstract, and often material gets buried under other material.

His work is as intriguing in its technical composition as it is in its multiplicity of meanings. His titles reveal his bent toward the spiritual and the meditative. Always preoccupied with the ring of words, titles play a major part in his work. Whether paradoxical, poetic, reverent, joyful, playful, or melancholic, his titles set up the perspectives from which he wants the works to be seen.

The medium, primarily from the artist's extensive collection of soil, is part of the artwork's mystique. The ground symbolically connects to the body because it deals with roots, stability, foundations, nourishment, and growth. The layers of soil hold evidence of our existence and raises the profound spiritual question: who are we, where are we, and for what purpose are we here? The earthy pigment may contribute to the paintings being perceived, and valued, as pure things in a corrupted world.

However, Madai evokes an ethereal world. His work is a poetic engagement with spirit and matter. He transforms the medium to express the particular sense of his own existence and the strength and fragility of the human spirit.

M. Jessica Rowe
Director of Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation
Former Assistant Director of Des Moines Arts Center

From Margaret A. Skove

Madai Taylor’s interaction with the world is most often porous and in this body of work he balances on the cusp of a vitality that is hope filled. He is open to his surrounding, taking in so much with no narrowing of visual or spiritual boundaries, and finding dreams in reality. Having faith in the presence of the grace inherent in the soil of the earth is the artist’s daily operating philosophy.

Margaret A. Skove
Director of the Blanden Memorial Art Musuem