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'Almost but Not Quite...'

The title of the exhibition for which this text was written - ‘The painting is almost abstract’ after the French title given to Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder translated as ‘The crime is almost perfect’ – suggested the remit of thinking around painting and abstraction. This links the research with current thinking about abstraction: not a set of given forms necessarily, nor a refusal of representation in itself, but a working through towards a condition of ‘abstraction’ not necessarily pre-formed or pre-given. This is what Morton Feldman called ‘the Abstract Experience’ which is picked up on in this essay.

Artists featured in the essay included Daniel Sturgis (curator of the Indiscipline of Painting, Tate St. Ives 2011-12), Jane Harris, Richard Curwen, Olivier Gourvil and others. This was published as a stand alone book related to the exhibitions in Valence, and Bourges, France, and Camberwell School of Art Gallery, London, as well as a symposium at the Institut Francais, London. Published by Analogue Press, Arles (in French and English). Research is related to, but distinct from, earlier publications: Hybrids (Tate Publishing 2001) and Talking Painting (Routledge 2002), the text looked at the relationship between the linguistic sign and visual/iconic sign, surface, notions of centrality/’facingness’ and ‘design’ within contemporary abstract painting (referencing Jacques Ranciere). In English and French.

Previous to the essay, a paper was given at the symposium Contemporary Painting and History at Tate Britain (2009), which examined gesture and time, topics that were reworked into the present text. Another text which reflects this research was ‘On Painting’ Art Monthly 3555, (April 2012) which looks at the idea of medium specificity in the expanded field