Wallow in Immanence

WALLOW IN IMMANENCE. 2011, Oil on canvas, 32 by 32 inches.

I used digital sketches and mockups and 3-d ray-tracing in an ongoing back-and-forth with this one, which is definitely supposed to be apparent. I don’t know what else is apparent, but since the amateur feedback I’ve been getting is approximately “THE COLORS MAN THE COLORS”, which gives no indication of what anyone is actually seeing besides colors, I'll provide a little more background and fish for insults.
The painting is structured by a composite image (i.e. not the visible light, but a visualization of the spectra of several common elements) of the Snake nebula. To the point of total coverage and saturation, it generated a multi-directional figure salad of drawings and paintings from at least 5 different male models, usually with the colors shifted to match the composite image or to pursue humanoid spectral extremes. There are some aliens and some anatomical absurdities and a lot of face avoidance.
The central figure is a female figure that mirrors those surroundings - again, not the way it would visibly work, but the way a 3-d program calculates it when the underlying image is 2-dimensional and ubiquitous.
The title refers to the old translation of The Second Sex, in which Simone De Beauvoir describes how women denied transcendence will defiantly, and somewhat masochistically, dedicate themselves to the material and present.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

2010, oils on canvas, 54"x42".
This took a year to complete, mostly because I've been taking a bit of a break from painting to curate a lot.
I was thinking about constructed causality, consequence, and how easily we mystify. Post Hoc is the "correlation implies causation" logical fallacy underlying much of religion and a great deal of bad science and rhetoric. I like to extremely remove it - to live in truth is to live in doubt. Although even drawing that connection is a causal relationship subject to methods of disambiguation. What does this have to do with insecty elf robots? Nothing, basically.
I did start with another astrophysics metaphor: the binary recurring nova system as a feedback loop. As in Veritas Odium Parit, a painting preceding and arguably causing Post Hoc, personal communication represents mass gravitational interaction. I kept going with redefining paint as figure until almost nothing was only itself any more. The scale has been reduced somewhat, and the interaction is asymmetrical. There are distinctly different regions with expanded rules for visual improvisation. There are fewer illusions of depth or animism and more archetypality and cartooniness to forms. The evasive mosaics are solid pixels rather than mimicking compression artifacts. What do you see here?