Sunday 25 October 2015

The Cartoon's



In the same vain as my recent paintings; the Cartoon series looks to use pictorial narrative to ‘characterize’ the conflict between figuration and abstraction.

Playing between figuration and abstraction the paintings become more than a singular style and instead can be seen as inventions and variables in an attempt to open up the dynamics of a singular.

The pictorial narrative’ in this series is the boyhood battle between Popeye and Bluto over Olive. This age old battle for love between enemies is seen through history and talks of conflict, victory, good vs evil and violence. At the same time this narrative brings through sentiments of naivety - through its cartoon illustrations and personal history as a program from our youth. 

Popeye and Bluto repeatedly flight for Olive’s affection in numerous episodes and series. This perpetual inevitability reflects the historical conflict within painting between abstraction and narration, since the turn of the 19th century their inevitable confrontation is what makes painting dynamic.

The Popeye series are formed through painted layers and geometric formations that talk of structure and depth that interweave with the cartoon stills creating an image of elements, which jostle for attention. Much like the unresolved themes in Popeye they too lie in the production of the painting.




Dangling the carrot





Straddling you, Purging them.

The inability within the studio to create a single work, a masterpiece, the break through, fuels a paradox that motives the next work, in a cat and mouse process. This paradox systematically positions values into some area of undirected dispute, collecting and storing the information. This provides an environment where the work can pick up elements and depose of them as they wish. Making the studio a place of overlap, symmetry and spillage. As the series moves forward so do the paintings as they pillage elements of other works creating an environment of theft.



“How do you deal with the past? Its about a distinction between copying and inventing form. This distinction has nothing to do with weather the form is original because you can invent a form, to look like something that existed. But that really has to do with the process so when you invent a form, based on things that exist, but thats form doesn’t necessarily share the look of these things or the material, cause its new, the question is what does it share? because it feels like it does resonate with these objects that exist? And the answer I came up with is that it has to do with the speech act. That their saying something...and you have to re-interpret.”

As Iman Issa write's her work Common Elements, have the ability to flex the distinction of their own display by manipulating the involuntary speech act of an object. The most successful way to dispute an objects speech is by locating it within a multiple. A second response to disrupting the speech act would be through the partial/fragment. This disruption of the speech act highlights the process in the studio manipulating paintings relationship as both an object and a tool of speech.

The studio work tries to isolate certain, elements or phonetics within the speech acts of objects, patterns and design and present them as fragmented or ineffective speech. The multiplicity shifts the depictive function from descriptive information to a system of variables in the display. Much like how a single playing card displays a singularity but within a deck you engage it within a value system that is its own and can change from game to game. Using visual tricks and devices the layers weave in between one another creating a lattice that is unanimously solid and porous. Such a structure offers flexibility catalysing the sense of the image becoming.

The fragmented speech acts of objects are used to highlight paintings own speech act and with that attempts to challenge the static. The work attempts to shift the perception of portrayal, within painting, from an involuntary act to an exchange system that is dependent on the viewers inclusive relationship with the work as a group. A focus on the shifting mechanism within image construction instead of creating a completely individual visual. The work purges the image of its necessity to portray clarity, in a sense dangling the carrot.

Friday 31 October 2014

Mining the Shallows.



“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.




Wednesday 2 July 2014

Building Context.


Install Metro Picture Gallery, Rene Daniels, 2014.



In the 1950’s abstraction took up its second motivation, on a new continent, where artist such as Pollock and Newman took European ideas of abstraction further. As Kirk Varnedoe describes in, Pictures of Nothing, By eliminating perspectival space they “advanced the line, of abstractions inevitable progress, logically to it supposedly destined pure expression of the essential visual qualities of painting without any remaining extraneous literally content.”

Painting was able to record and display, process and chance, through a new bodily interaction with pictorial space. The repositioning of the canvas from a vertical support structure, in front of its subject matter, to a horizontal workspace captures the transition painting went through. Instead of constituting a self-contained entity painting shifted in its operation redefining its foundation, from a referential medium to a transitional mode of communication. Painting broke its formal language and stripped the excess.


David Salle, His Brain 1984
What I find interesting is how these two forms that bring together the majority of paintings mouldings over the last 60 years, abstraction and figuration, have the possibility to produce a third. This third agenda is not a new ‘staging’ of painting, as it has been occurring since the 80’s, in paintings such as David Salle’s, His Brain, 1984. In such a work imagery is bought together in what seems to be a sporadic and scattered composition. But what you find is a collage of fragments that present a whimsical relationship and only through their relationship, within the whole image, does a context begin to develop. In such a work the image is used through its multiplicity to produce an internal relationship that begins to shift painting from a singular self-aware object to a transmissible platform.


Luc Tuymans, Gas Chamber, 1986
Expanding further you can look to Luc Tuymans and works such as Gas Chamber, 1986. In such a work Tuymans depicts an empty, muted generic room. By calling it Gas Chamber Tuymans expands the context of the image from its exterior and charges the work with an agency that Peter Geimer defines as: “Tuyman’s paintings have a meaning that goes beyond the visible and that cannot be deciphered through mere observation. We have to search for it somewhere outside of the picture." Looking at a third, Rene Daniels, he depicts motifs that repeat through a whole series of works that flick between a bow tie and an interior space. This flickering, of one object’s potential, charges the imagery with multiple possibilities. This multiplicity of meaning decentralises the structural rigor of an image and with that charges the image with an agency that seems self aware of its own contradictions and uses it to displace the viewer’s expectation. In doing so the image in its postmodern, post-structural, habitation changes from a rhetorical medium to a platform of transmission that can not only create an agency through the multiple (Salle) but also use its exterior (Tuymans) and its repetition (Daniels) to break apart the wholeness of the image and with that create a far more three dimensional aspect to painting.