Output details

Machines and Diagrams

Machines and Diagrams was an exhibition of 3 large paintings, 3 smaller works and framed crayon drawings at Gooden Gallery; an independent, commercial gallery space situated in Vyner St, East London. This location has become well known to a metropolitan audience for its mix of new experimental spaces showing work by young artists and more established dealers who show avant-garde, internationally acclaimed artists. Addressing such an audience, yet working within the normative medium of painting, the originality of the work lies not in questions about the validity or relevance of painting as a form of practice but in investigating and articulating the processes which underpin its construction.

The conception of painting at stake is of a radically non-representational form of practice (which is not synonymous with the label ‘abstract painting’ although the work would be identified as such). Looking to repeat, in painting, Deleuze’s demonstration of a non-representational relation between writing and philosophy, the works are constructed through a material process by which thoughts, ideas, images that have been formed outside of the work are ‘interpreted’ as fragments, forces and rhythms; virtual elements that only become actualised in the new unity of a finished work.

The significance of this practice is in its relation to history; for in giving new form to invisible and unconscious forces and rhythms created in past works (such as paintings by Mondrian, Noland and the Spanish artist Juan Usle) the paintings create new perspectives on those works; effectively creating them anew and refiguring history from a contemporary standpoint. The rigour of the research is tested in the public domain of this exhibition, for despite the claims made here the works had to stand up to aesthetic scrutiny; to work as paintings in their own terms.