2023

DISRUPTIONS, FICTIONS

It has been 5 years since my last full solo exhibition and in that time, I’ve continued an exploration of painterly disrupted imagery built within shifting, fluid, rippling, organic painterly surfaces. Surfaces where the imagery exists and is embedded in a painterly space which shifts and changes during the process of painting. Working across 3 genres of painting, fictive portraits, urban imagery and still life this painterly method has different implications within each of the 3 genres yet the overarching theme is to create imagery which is both familiar and uncanny.

The fictive portraits begin as found/sourced and generally displaced imagery, usually black and white snapshots. The displacement and anonymity of the source imagery allows a painterly transformative process to begin. Sometimes, that transformation is triggered by a particular look or a mood conveyed, a feeling sensed, a memory recalled which is translated and heightened through the process of painting into another form.

The urban imagery is primarily located within my own city environment, places I often walk past on a relatively daily basis. Not scenic nor immediately recognisable civic spaces but very defined, contained semi anonymous spaces; car parks, plazas, parks. Once again, a certain anonymity allows a kind of alterable physical memory space to begin the process of change. Within those depicted spaces the painterly surface breaks the image into pixelations, erasures or shadowed forms which lay on the surface yet also inhabit a particular space, at a distance within the pictorial space.

The still lives exist as simple studio arrangements of immediately recognisable forms, an orange, a lemon, a beaker; usually arranged in relationships where one influences the other. The painterly application both heightens and disrupts form. I’ve asked simple questions of these particular works; What is a grey orange? How much colour can one add to a grey orange before it is no longer grey? What strange chemistry occurs between eye and brain when we look at a lemon let alone a pink lemon?

Translations, transformations, solid believable impossibilities.

Daryl Austin
Newmarch Gallery 2023