This triptych comprises three still-frame photographs from Dan Colen's film "Peanuts" (2010), which documented the artist's aleatory path through New York with a bag of peanuts in hand. The artist is visible in each color photograph. The three pieces were created to coincide with the opening of Colen's first major museum exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway. The photographs come lying flat a case, as pictured, and each measures 8.5 x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm); when assembled as a triptych, the work measures just over 25.5 x 33 inches (64.8 x 83.8 cm).

Traditional writing would present protagonists as autonomous and developed characters ready to be described. With the birth of the anti-hero, the character's reality started to be described in fieri, while running events would model his persona. This is developed by the means of an internal monologue, which likens Dan Colen to Leopold Bloom and his peripatetic voyage throughout the streets of Dublin. These paths are operated via an immediate transcription, unable to carry a rational order. By a banal and personal action such as eating peanuts, the voyage of the artist becomes a tumultuous and vivid description of the society surrounding him. This direct discursive language is the basis of graffiti's technique, which is an art form that can't be unhitched from the illegal and counterculture obligations: once graffiti is staged, it succumbs to the state of order and graceful communal acceptance and becomes relegated to the glittering ghetto that shaped its reason to fight against it. The artist does not look for any legitimation, the tumultuous forces into his consciousness would not permit that. He leaves footmarks of his passage while leaving another peanut shell to the ground.

Dan Colen (b. 1979, Leonia, NJ) is a contemporary American artist whose paintings, sculptures, films, and installations draw on the visual vocabulary of American youth culture. Inspired by mass media, childhood games, comic strips, and even candy wrappers, Colen’s work combines high genre with an exuberant appreciation for the undervalued and overlooked. Colen has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2011); Gagosian Gallery, New York and London, England (2006, 2010); Massimo de Carlo, Milan, Italy (2010); Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany and Los Angeles, CA (2006); and Deitch Projects, New York, NY (2006). He lives and works in New York, NY.