Biography
My painting practice currently centres on the development of a series of quasi-allegorical paintings. This involves appropriating imagery from the baroque, rococo, neo-classical and early 20th century figurative painting canon, which I reconstruct into large/medium-scale works and miniatures. The larger works indirectly reference the history painting genre with its grandiloquent narrative structure.
I then overlay the underlying image with optical devices in the form of compressed parallel lines, Ben-day dots and digital pixel-like patterning. These optical devices refer obliquely to mechanical image-making techniques associated with reprographic print technology and ‘glitch art’ via databending. Functioning like brushstrokes, these overlaid devices play a constituent role in creating the illusion of form. Over-painting the 2D graphic on top of the painterly illusion is a play on medium specificity; creating visual interventions subverting the often didactical reading that traditional figurative painting presents to the viewer. The textures of the new mediums leave their traces on the old, creating a palimpsest-like effect; one that symbolizes the chronology of the development of digital image processing coupled with the seductive quality of painterly form.
