When you enter the room you will be confronted with an exact line of small format works, which surround the walls of the gallery. They are all the same size (17x24cms) and are spaced equally apart. They are made with acrylic, pen and pencil on paper, taped to the wall without frames. They have no titles, merely a production date, which helps to differentiate them.
Each work was predominantly made in one day. The format allows this and creates a good time frame for the artist to pursue one thought process, follow one mood, focus on one specific formal construction. A few works, which weren't completed in this time frame, often took weeks or months to finish. There was a writer, the artist knew, who used to write one page a day. He'd write in the morning, have a break and then correct in the afternoon. This type of almost bureaucratic practice is how the artist sets up his working environment.
There is a vast spectrum of shapes, lines and colour on show. Stencils are used, both homemade and bought. Forms and lines vary in every possible size and direction. Flat forms and forms with depth occupy spaces, lines collide, expand, over- and underlap, lines lead us from beginning to end, they order and disrupt, appearing in grids and invented systems.
Then there is the hard edged, industrially flat, graphic colour, which offers a certain weight or gravitas of meaningless meaning to the imagery, a decisive nonsense, or simply a poetic push and pull of form and colour. Few if any brushstrokes are on view. Monotone works sit next to very colourful images. Occasionally a more organic blur appears, and then the hard and soft elements are combined to create another stimulating dialogue. With his 'democratic' application of paint he seems to avoid a hierarchy of shape and form.
The artist has a seemingly non exhaustive vocabulary, a mechanical exploration of a formal abstract language, which constantly reinvents itself, and continuously sends himself and subsequently the viewer along different paths. As in most painting you make an initial mark on a blank canvas and the game begins with all following marks corresponding to what came before. The artist seems to highlight and continue this game from one image to the next, creating a dynamic momentum through the body of work and exhibition. Repetition and symmetry play an important role, yet he somehow avoids repeating himself. Trial and error persists, where errors are unseen as they are allowed, even promoted. Then the compositions jump from classically balanced, to something symmetrical, while in others the rules become extinct. Without looking it would be difficult to predict what comes next.
George Barber
