This exhibition will take place from January 10 to February 2, 2020. Its status is confirmed. I will present eight small scale paintings in an attempt to bridge the gap between the physicality of the world of objects and the simulated, virtual world of signs that are represented on the digital computer screen. Painting in this context I will argue, becomes an imagined physicality of the corporeal. I will present this imagined physicality as a phenomenology of aesthetics which is intended to complement the digital rather than work against it - to recognize the impact that reproducible (non Descartian) digital space has on our understanding of our bodies as sole authors of unique objects.
Secondly, and at the same time, the presentation will seek to offer multiple readings connected to painting: a cross-over and merging of recognized historical genres and methodologies of Art History such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art; a relation between the bodily and the augmented virtual as an accumulation of temporality, action, colour and form, through the build-up of fragmented signs.
Simultaneously, a third element will be combined and which underpins all of my practice. I will explore the philosophical act and methodologies of making itself. I will convert Greenberg’s physical determinism using Andrew Benjamin’s notion that contemporary abstract painters, through making, accept and transform the historical/modernist premise of the yet-to-be-resolved object/painting by staging a repetition of historical abstraction as an event of becoming.
The outcome will adopt and present the following methods: Decorating processes and utilitarian materials (household paint and transparent coloured floor varnishes) will be repeatedly poured and painted in combination with commercially produced stencils. The signs become buried within poured, flat layering which are both transparent and opaque. By encompassing embodied gesture, form, colour, line, chance, depth and opticality, the disembodied digital is referenced by the absence of hand-gestured expression and combined with digitally sourced stencils and clip art. Optical and physical depths as surface effect will become visible which mimics the palimpsests of virtual layering. Equally, and at the same time, a reflective, auto-figurative style will be sought with the use of colour, choice of imagery and formal/non-formal arrangement.
