(Please click to expand images or upon links to partners in text)
This installation of paintings was produced recently in response to the economic activities and history of the region of Bordeaux, upon the occasion of the BAD+ residency program following an invitation by artistic director and curator Marie Maertens. The works directly connect the liquid nature of paint to the commercial influence of the river Garonne, viticulture, oyster production, and the productive economic forces of water beyond this context.
This exhibition is the first stage of an ongoing research into the relationships between paint and economic models, transitions between states of matter (fluid, solid, vapor) and the conceptual development of liquidation as a process of transfer between ‘becoming abstract’ and ‘becoming real’.
The project produced three discrete series (described below) to envolop and recontextualise other paintings within a framework of liquidity.
Liquidity, studio install view, Brussels 2024
The Imposte series presents a suite of underwater points of view, directed towards the surface as its limit breaks into image of the sky. These paintings gradually shifted into a focus upon the transition between a structured image and an illusory surface, where a specific kind of threshold or limit between hyperrealism and abstraction was in constant negotiation. They are trompe l'oeil imposters, Impostes being literally the space allocated above a door in French – they are the manifest experience of a simultaneously real and false perspective, of something ‘going over one’s head’. They suggest the geologically unmanageable liquid reality that is the basis of our experience on earth, which we attempt to circumference, manage and overcome via ‘the cloud’.
Imposte, 2024, 50 x 95 cm, Oil on linen
Imposte, 2024, 50 x 95 cm, Oil on linen
Imposte, 2024, 50 x 95 cm, Oil on linen
Imposte, 2024, 50 x 95 cm, Oil on linen
Glace I, Glace II, Glace III - 2024, 50cmØ each, Oil on canvas
The Glace series present service trays filled with ice, a flow of material in a frozen state. The works were directly inspired by the recent economic interruption to oyster production in the region due to a virus, but they extend themselves into a more universal consideration of geological materiality and economics writ-large – Is the state of something being frozen or suspended actually something that happens in reality, or is it just something we abstractly project upon a situation due to economic circumstance? Throughout the painting process these works came to resemble things of an alternative consistency, stones or glaciers perhaps, projecting a geological scale of time. The paintings make evident that all paintings are, in the end, the artificial freezing of flows of energy and time across a surface.
Verre I, Verre II, Verre III - 2024, 50cmØ each, Oil on canvas
The Verre series depart from the experience of presence and absence in front of a painting, which is always being filled and emptied both throughout their making by a painter and their interpretation by a viewer. It is here that the duality of transparency/opacity becomes ambiguous or literally turns in circles – as an image of transparency is presented via an almost pure opacity in intention leaving only form, or more precisely format ( even the measurement of 50 cm suggests a half full/half empty situation). The vessel and all of its connotations find themselves specifically punctuated by the historical context of transatlantic trade and viniculture situated in Bordeaux. These paintings are objects that serve consumption without the object to be consumed.
These three distinct series enveloped and punctuated other works that imagine more universal, mechanic or abstract representations of this notion of liquidity.
Pump (Irrigation), 2024, 200x160 cm, Oil on linen
Filter (Archipel), 2024, 200x160 cm, Oil on linen
Silicone / Vinaigre, 2012-2024, 73 x 60 cm, Oil on linen
Recycleur, 2024, 60 x 73 cm, Oil on linen