Chris Crites: American Psycho - Financial Terrorists.

For over a decade, Chris Crites has been known for his hand painted four and five-color portraits of vintage mug shots that are meticulously rendered on brown paper bags.

In collaboration with 360SEE, Crites has been known to stray from mid-century subjects and paint portraits of contemporary high-profile criminals.  As a follow up to his highly publicized Pay-To-Play series, featuring portraits of disgraced former Illinois Governors and a political fundraiser, Crites has now explored the corruption in the financial sector with the series American Psycho - Financial Terrorists. 

This new series consists of (4) 4x5” hand painted, framed, portraits of artist-accused financial terrorists:

Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke; CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein; former CEO of Goldman Sachs, former CEO of MF Global, former US Senator, and former Governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine; and Chairman, President, and Chief Executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

These paintings are in response to the ongoing financial crisis(es) that have been happening since the Global Financial Crisis that became painfully apparent in the 2008 global economic recession. The creation and use of complex financial products coupled with undisclosed conflicts of interest and the failure of regulators and credit rating agencies or even "the market" itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street led to disaster not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

The 1999 repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 effectively removed the separation that previously existed between Wall Street investment banks and depository banks. Banks then developed insane new products to sell and trade during the same time a bubble emerged in the real estate market. For years these crimes had been allowed to continue by large banks and the people who were entrusted to police them.

My main body of work is based on mug shot photographs. The players in this ongoing financial quandary are so powerful that I doubt they will be held to account and that we would ever see real mug shots from real arrests of these people. I am however presenting some of the parties still standing for what they are, insane, criminal sociopaths.

-Chris Crites