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Touching Colour - 3 Paintings by Mosscrop included in Touching Colour at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2013.

3 Paintings by Mosscrop included in Touching Colour at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2013.

The research explores the aesthetic implications of an analogy between painting and biological life, imagining painting to be endowed with auto-generative potential, colour operating as a productive force within a genetic framework of geometric and procedural rules. This research conceives colour as a system of infinite differentiation and each division between adjacent colours as a fundamental unit of a painting’s articulation and its source of energy and growth.

This research develops from Mosscrop’s previous work exploring the creative potential of chance and geometry and linking Deleuze’s 1978 seminars on Spinoza to gestalt psychology.The exhibition included 3 paintings selected from a series employing a motif of radially divided circles, painted with delicacy and precision using full-spectrum colour on immaculately constructed gesso panels. The paintings operate as highly formalised microcosmic arenas in which speculative scenarios are applied and evaluated. Studio equipment, such as Mosscrop’s tailor-made ‘roulette wheel of colour’, was conceived as possessing its own inherent intelligence as a decision making agency.

Informed by the work of artists such as Hilma af Klint and Otto Freundlich, this research aligns with recent re-evaluations of the spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of early modernism, and shares with painters such as Andrew Bick, Anslem Reyle, Jens Wolf and Bernd Ribbeck a continuing interest in the contemporary potential of colour and geometry.

The Hatton Gallery is Newcastle University’s gallery and part of the Great North Museum. Invited by Curated by Robin Airey, this exhibition coincided with the Congress of the International Colour Association (AIC), hosted by the university’s department of Visual Neuroscience, and focused on artists who explore the areas where colours meet and included works by major contemporary artists including Susan Hiller, Angela Bulloch, David Bachelor and James Hugonin.