A Small Remembrance of Something more Solid.
A show of paintings and of painting. A show of pictures of pictures.
Copying and sharing pictures is familiar enough to feel routine. Occasionally we might pause and wonder what we are doing for long enough to google “Plato’s Cave”, but the pictures will continue multiplying at breakneck speed. The pictures in this show were perhaps made within such moments of pause and wonder, and to invite those moments to be extended into a prolonged act of really looking at pictures.
There are many reasons for looking at pictures rather than at the other things in the world, and there are many ways to think about pictures being remade. An already existing picture might be considered a ready-made, it might be remade as a copy, an appropriation, a quotation, a pastiche, a homage, a fake, or be approached as if making a cover version or karaoke.
The works in this show revisit and translate photographs and paintings in order to pay attention to and explore the materials actions of picturing – the fragile, fluid and haptic qualities of a surface alchemy, a particular sort of material activity that sits behind so many images. Like the forms they depict, pictures are only seemingly static, examining a picture reveals a constant state of flux and becoming.
Paul Merrick
National Geographic magazine images from the 1950s and 60s continue to pre-occupy Paul Merrick’s practice. Published at a time when the world was a larger place, this iconic magazine provided windows into hidden traditions, mysterious landscapes and beguiling portraits with its reportage and unique vintage palette.
These new paintings are meditations, each exploring a new focus, a balance between figuration and abstraction with thick paint contrasting against thin. Painted on aluminium the oil paint is worked and reworked either using an electric sander or by hand. The excavation of the surface is crucial to the process, revealing previous layers of paint to unveil a new image of forgotten places from another time.
Jane Millican
These works in pencil on paper developed from ongoing curiosity around of the visual and material drama of expressionist painting, its coded gestures, and the tradition of connoisseurship that closely examines the painted gestures that might establish attribution and value. For these drawings, pictures remade and depicted within pictures were selected. Already abstracted through their remaking and consequently articulating their own material gestures more clearly than they describe their original subjects, the pictures have been made again as pictures of painting pictures.
