"Currin's technique involves a continuous
swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame. The surface in his work is radically heterogeneous: some areas, even some strokes, move closer toward ideality; other areas, often adjacent, move away. There is no point of rest or closure to this dialectic, nothing finally redeemed or finally condemned. Rather, the goal is to show how, in figurative painting, morphology really works, how it recruits and plays with our own psychic investments as we view."
Norman Bryson, "Maudit: John Currin and Morphology," in Kara Vander Weg, Ed., John Currin, New York 2006, p. 30