The Dark Undoes

This work is an example of my returning, in 2011, more fundamentally, to the problems of the spontaneous gesture in painting. This type of gesture is what, in twentieth-century modernism, might have been construed as the primitive or childlike hand, or the emotive mark, with all its romantic and unconscious implications, but which has long lost its savagery and politics; has been cultivated as cultural code, or purloined for its decorative qualities by industry. Now refusing the previous illustrative approach to mark making in my work, I became more interested in an enactment of site. The problem became one of how to make an immanent work through the plotting of one gesture onto another, investigated as an additive and structuring process rather than an expressive one. The inquiry is an attempt to find new potential in mark making: recuperating the gesture in a process that seeks departures from within the debris of Abstract Expressionism’s exhausted former ambitions.