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Excerpt from the exhibition essay
A Note on The Grey Planets,
by
Peter Suchin.
The full text is included in the publication Four Exhibitions:
October 2008 - August 2009
(click for larger images)
For my
exhibition The Grey Planets, held at H-I-C-A in October
2008, I assembled what was in effect a mini-retrospective of my paintings
to date.
The way
these paintings are produced ties in well, I think, with certain aspects
of “concrete” art, which is perhaps the main aesthetic and philosophical
interest supported by H-I-C-A, and which helps to define its particularity
as an exhibition space. This concern with what I take to be – in one
consideration of the label “concrete” – a focusing-in on the materiality
of works of art is why I was keen to show at the space. When starting a
new painting the board or canvas I use is painted over with any colour
that’s to hand. Other layers are applied, “random” shapes are marked out,
the surface is extensively reworked and reordered, often over a time scale
of several years. Acrylic paint is employed, a medium which dries quickly,
allowing any number of layers of paint to be applied in a single day. I do
not base the marks or shapes I make on actual objects, entities or places.
The painting is almost entirely generated through the complicated and
time-consuming manipulation of a composition that comes out of working the
painting’s surface. Neither drawings, nor photographs, nor any other
mnemonic devices are used in the production of the work.
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In other
words, the work is generated out of what one might cautiously call a
“dialogue” between myself and the painted surface. It is an open-ended
process, there is no attempt to capture or record a specific mood or sense
of something already “out there” in the world. The work is “concrete”
through and through, because it is entirely a material thing.
In this
way, one might claim that the paintings refuse many of the ideologies of
Modernist (including “abstract”) art, even if, superficially, their
appearance is sometimes akin to previously experienced abstract works.
What my practice implicitly rejects are ideas of the “spiritual” and also
of “expression”. The emphasis upon the “concrete-ness” of the working
process is extremely important, but it is not a matter of unearthing any
kind of “essence” there either, such as that of paint itself (supposing
there was such a thing apart from in a merely technical sense), or even of
the act of paint application. It is not a question of the gesture of the
artist. Notions of essences are invariably misleading. By stating that the
works have a predominantly concrete sense about them I mean that they are,
on one level, nothing other than this, nothing other, that is, than a
certain accumulation of choices, actions, received or invented techniques
and ideas. I think of them more as actualised propositions for
paintings, than as expressive devices. They are not transmitters of
preconceived meaning; the meanings they make manifest and accrue through
time are the result of their emphatically material, concrete form
and the (entirely secular) procedures at my disposal
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