My painting practice foregrounds a relational subjectivity which superimposes material making, art historical and utilitarian decorative tropes, with the immaterial opticality of the screen. I combine a) a reframing of the historical tropes and contrasting styles of abstraction with pop art (and baroque and renaissance painting), b) interrogate the relations between the embodied, physical materiality of painting with the immaterial depth of the disembodied digital screen, and c) promote the decorative and utilitarian functions of commercially sourced house paints and transparent floor varnishes as ‘high art’. I claim that material making is a complex mirroring of the ubiquity of digitised images and signs; that painting phenomenologically operates as a constant negotiation with the symbolic virtual which challenges the painter’s subjective relation to time and space and is central to contemporary painting’s criticality.

Materially, I conflate historicised, classical perspective with the modernist flat picture-plane to produce a process-led, flat-on-flat, transparent, poured and opaque series of abstract overlays in which I embed popular graphic signs and symbols. This layering, I claim, reflects the screen’s disembodied use of windows etc., which overlaps and contrasts a new, relational material/immaterial ontology. In 2021 I began to embed digital poster images into my paintings which were made from photos on my phone and directly reference the screen to depict the manual, material production of my working studio tools, paints and equipment.

Academically, since my PhD in 2003, I have been engaged in a consistent contextual overview of my practice that combines multiple theoretical positions - a) Clement Greenberg’s flat-painted materiality with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological claim that the painter transforms the relationship between the body and a painting by overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects, b) by repositioning non-objective screen theories such as Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of mass media communication and Stephen Perrella’s and Markus Novak’s architectural hypersurface, in parallel with Merleau-Ponty’s hyperreflective subject/object ontology.

www.michaelstubbs.org