Artist Statement

My practice is located within a context which engages with the zero gesture in painting, addressing the critical relevancy of painting and its ability to reflect upon and engage with its own histories. Hence it could be described as painting about painting, or meta-painting. Making use of the notion of the “holes in space” created by electronic and digital technologies, there is a reworking this concept as an “aesthetic of the void” which draws on the conceptual, procedural and material emphasis of non-objective painting and on the conventions of painting as object, formalist minimalism and process based conceptualism.

There is an engagement with the concept of space, which at times makes reference to non-isotropic space and the principles of reverse or inverse perspective - with such ideas have “a genealogy that stretches back to the early twentieth-century ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov concerning cosmic space as the arena and anti-gravity – or the overcoming of gravity – as the project for artistic activity,” and some years later Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s … “notions concerning ‘planetary feeling’ and ‘tilted space’ as ways of overcoming Euclidean perspective.” There is a negotiation between the idea of space and the experience of space, that is, representations of space (the abstract, conceptual spaces of the architect or cartographer) and the spaces of lived experience, “…which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”. Here, Malevich’s 34 Drawings (published 1920) and other instances of the Russian tradition’s engagment with hyperbolic and four dimensional space in the context of concrete and non-objective painting are invoked.

Looking to Bataille (1897-1962), who proposed the notion of ‘formless’ - understood as a philosophical position against the so called pursuit of purity or essentialism (in both a metaphysical and material sense) which was a goal of many artists engaged in practices within the field of abstraction - what can be overlooked is that the work of key figures within abstraction often demonstrated a lack of purity which was as much a part of the work as were any claims to ‘truth’ or essence which might be revealed through a pursuit of pure form. Alan Kaprow, writing in the 1960s, suggested that for the notion of purity to make any sense, it relied upon revealed impurities. Here I am interested in the so-called 'failure' of painting and that of anti-pursuit. In the concluding paragraph of his essay Provisional Painting (1), Raphael Rubenstein suggests that many contemporary painters find themselves in a ‘minor’ position. Here he cites Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, drawing a comparision between the position of many painters today and the position of Kafka they describe in their book Kakfa: Towards a Minor Literature (1986). Kafka found himself in a ‘minor’ position, his cultural position as an outsider making it ‘impossible’ to participate in a dominant discourse. At the same time, it was impossible for Kafka to not write. Rubenstein suggests that “recent painters may have found themselves in similarly ‘minor’ situations; the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.” (2)

It is a conceptual practice which is informed by such notions as that expressed by John O'Reilly who when writing on Martin Creed, asks, "How may different ways can you communicate nothing?" This recalls for me a statement made by Gerhard Richter in the 1970s, where he states that the work "...makes no statement whatsoever...it...lead(s) to nothing meaningful..." when embarking on a series of grey monochrome painting, here invoking the failure of painterly abstraction of the 1960s and 70s and with the endgame of painting.

I conceive of the various projects I undertake as meta-painting, as a critical engagement with the utopian and essentialist trajectories which have dominated the discipline.
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1 Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Provisional Painting’, in Art in America, May 2009.
2 Ibid, 134.

Artist Statement

My practice is located within a context which engages with the zero gesture in painting, addressing the critical relevancy of painting and its ability to reflect upon and engage with its own histories. Hence it could be described as painting about painting, or meta-painting. Making use of the notion of the “holes in space” created by electronic and digital technologies, there is a reworking this concept as an “aesthetic of the void” which draws on the conceptual, procedural and material emphasis of non-objective painting and on the conventions of painting as object, formalist minimalism and process based conceptualism.

There is an engagement with the concept of space, which at times makes reference to non-isotropic space and the principles of reverse or inverse perspective - with such ideas have “a genealogy that stretches back to the early twentieth-century ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov concerning cosmic space as the arena and anti-gravity – or the overcoming of gravity – as the project for artistic activity,” and some years later Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s … “notions concerning ‘planetary feeling’ and ‘tilted space’ as ways of overcoming Euclidean perspective.” There is a negotiation between the idea of space and the experience of space, that is, representations of space (the abstract, conceptual spaces of the architect or cartographer) and the spaces of lived experience, “…which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”. Here, Malevich’s 34 Drawings (published 1920) and other instances of the Russian tradition’s engagment with hyperbolic and four dimensional space in the context of concrete and non-objective painting are invoked.

Looking to Bataille (1897-1962), who proposed the notion of ‘formless’ - understood as a philosophical position against the so called pursuit of purity or essentialism (in both a metaphysical and material sense) which was a goal of many artists engaged in practices within the field of abstraction - what can be overlooked is that the work of key figures within abstraction often demonstrated a lack of purity which was as much a part of the work as were any claims to ‘truth’ or essence which might be revealed through a pursuit of pure form. Alan Kaprow, writing in the 1960s, suggested that for the notion of purity to make any sense, it relied upon revealed impurities. Here I am interested in the so-called 'failure' of painting and that of anti-pursuit. In the concluding paragraph of his essay Provisional Painting (1), Raphael Rubenstein suggests that many contemporary painters find themselves in a ‘minor’ position. Here he cites Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, drawing a comparision between the position of many painters today and the position of Kafka they describe in their book Kakfa: Towards a Minor Literature (1986). Kafka found himself in a ‘minor’ position, his cultural position as an outsider making it ‘impossible’ to participate in a dominant discourse. At the same time, it was impossible for Kafka to not write. Rubenstein suggests that “recent painters may have found themselves in similarly ‘minor’ situations; the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.” (2)

It is a conceptual practice which is informed by such notions as that expressed by John O'Reilly who when writing on Martin Creed, asks, "How may different ways can you communicate nothing?" This recalls for me a statement made by Gerhard Richter in the 1970s, where he states that the work "...makes no statement whatsoever...it...lead(s) to nothing meaningful..." when embarking on a series of grey monochrome painting, here invoking the failure of painterly abstraction of the 1960s and 70s and with the endgame of painting.

I conceive of the various projects I undertake as meta-painting, as a critical engagement with the utopian and essentialist trajectories which have dominated the discipline.
______________________________________________________
1 Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Provisional Painting’, in Art in America, May 2009.
2 Ibid, 134.