“The point of abstraction is not so much meaning as being… before the work conveys reality it must achieve its own reality”
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The paintings you see in this show are not seen as abstractions but rather as inventions, whimsical attempts to open the surface of the paintings, allowing a process of depiction that rids the image of its cohesive qualities. Elements of road signs, street markings, weather maps, patterns, designs and culture mix in a practice that looks to both highlight and mock the process of depiction. Looking to Adolf Loos “Ornament is Crime”; Loos states that ornament is now an excess to modern man, while the state holds onto ornament as a anchoring value and that value is cultural history. Using this contradictory state the work plays between the two boundaries having numerous, symbols, signs and patterns displayed from several, cultures and disciplines one finds confliction, confusion and distrust.
Such contradictions highlight the transferable nature of value within depiction, liberating elements from its necessity to portray. Functional signs loose there meaning while patterns are reconstituted within a different set of parameters. Each becomes mobile to the other allowing an accessibility that can be utilised.
In doing so the work shakes of the static notion of imagery, as a preconceived element, stumbling over itself and squeezing through the gaps available. Rapid marks maybe made but multiple pieces are made at one time. This communal alliance occurs outside of the painting and builds the charge within the work energizing the studio space allowing the works to help one another to move forward and sometimes backward. The studio becomes a trading off – much like chess, as you hope the moves you take pay off. This sense of maneuvering is layered with elements of tension and has become a central concern within the studio. It offers me a longevity whenever I get bogged down by an image or a train of thought to escape to another, in a sense the work is based on a collective conversation.
The process and the depiction are about becoming and allows the paintings to find their own pictorial integrity as the work plays or bets against itself; where criticism may not lie in its content but more so in the success of its evolution in turn creating its own reality.
This has currently concluded with the process of bringing elements of interest physically into the studio. Hay bundles create sprayed silhouettes for their own depiction or rubbings of man hole covers are printed on wallpaper not only to bring the immediacy of depiction to the forefront in a ontic display but rather to highlight in further detail the continuos system of conversation within the studio.
