-form, 2007

Hidde van Seggelen Gallery, London

 

A group of works in acrylic and alkyd resin on abraded mild steel that, as one viewer phrased it, were 'almost impossible to see'.

This exhibition fell a couple of months after the unveiling of the first smartphone, the iPhone. It thus coincided with a radical transformation in how images were made and viewed, and more generally with how we negotiate and understand our world. All the subsequent works documented here are in some measure responses to this transforming currency of images. The fascination driving these early works—animation through light, a play between the visible and the invisible, between the material and the immaterial, between the singular and the reproduced—remain central to my work today. Over the subsequent years these early interests have inevitably been alloyed with fresh concerns, not least the tightening grip of surveillance capitalism and the material repercussions of our digital shadows. The sense of wonder at the complexity of looking and the desire to engage with what painting has been and through this with what new forms it can assume remains constant.