2013

FICTIONS

Greenaway Art Gallery, 20 November – 20 December 2013

A series of 12 small paintings which seemingly appear to be colourised vintage portrait photographs, this body of work presents a collision and fusion of painterly and photographic imagery. Alternating between realism and painterly abstraction, these works question our faith in the veracity of both portraiture and photography. Faces are reconfigured and recomposed, backgrounds shift, landscapes and objects appear or fade away. How certain can we be, when reality and artifice are so linked, that the portrait of the man depicted in “Trenton 1933” can ever have existed, let alone in that time and place. We can be more certain that the painter is seeking to use a flexible, shifting painting process in conjunction with imagination and visual memory to engender alternate realities as the images are painted.