About

Conrad Wells is a self-taught visual artist that has been heavily influenced by expressionism, New York School poetry, as well as the academic fields of medievalism, post-structuralism and art history. Conrad was born in Chicago, IL . He grew up on the South Side and the Deep South. Currently, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

My work explores the instability of language and perception, using layered textures and fragmented symbols to create a sense of charged ambiguity. Through mixed media painting, I engage with the ways words, letters, and images slip away from certainty, becoming something both familiar and unknowable.

I build my surfaces with weathered textures, cracked acrylic mediums, and collaged ephemera—materials that suggest time, erosion, and reassembly. These elements resist smoothness, embodying the messy, fractured nature of communication. Found text plays a central role in my process, from newspaper clippings and handwritten notes to archival documents and advertisements. I alter and distort these fragments, transforming them into artifacts of an unfamiliar system.

Symbolically, I am drawn to letterforms that hover between recognition and obfuscation, often inventing or deconstructing scripts that resemble language but evade direct legibility. Maps, diagrams, and marginalia appear throughout my work, referencing forgotten narratives or lost knowledge.

By layering abstraction with the remnants of historical and contemporary media, my paintings invite viewers to question how meaning is constructed, eroded, and reconstructed over time. The work exists in the space between legibility and dissolution, where language bends, fractures, and reforms into something new.