My work is informed by the two major innovations of 20th century Modernist art: Collage and Abstraction. Here in the 21st century, Collage is a ubiquitous visual tool that has permeated almost every level of visual culture morphing once more to find its place in new digital realms. Abstraction’s history of signs is mired in rhetoric. Stretched and contrary, it harbours the icons of the most esoteric of visual cultures and utopian ideals but also, the screen based slick signage of web sites, smart phones and bank logos. With these tensions and contradictions in mind, I like to rip apart and atomise what might be taken for granted about abstract painting only to relentlessly warp and reconfigure our assumptions with new and exotic formulations. I combine print media, defunct advertising remnants and other urban detritus gleaned from city streets with more traditional mediums to produce complex free reining abstractions in the form of wall based assemblages. They are built up of internal relations of incongruous shaped parts to create a new whole without use of a stretcher or traditional support or surface. I re-employ the tropes of risk and spontaneity reminiscent of mid-twentieth century painting and use extreme changes in scale and materials to make artworks that flit between object and image. Both formally elegant and brutally direct, these particular works yoke my long-standing obsession with pitting the unashamedly lyrical force of abstract painting against the base materiality, the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday world.
2020.
Niola
2019
68 x 73 cm
£1400
Rocheradius
2019
89 x 70 cm
£1400
