A Restless Practice
By Professor Alice Jenkins
What are these fleshy body parts - a bottom, an unmatched pair of ears, a mouth and nose, a single ear - doing alongside those elegant, refined, futuristic images of data captured as streaks of light? Rabelais next to Bladerunner?
Both sorts of painting delight in the handling of paint: the building up of texture out of marks on top of marks on top of marks: thin, fine slices of colour for the data; dots, dabs and drags for the flesh. There's no surface here that isn't constructed out of depth, built up in layers which remain
just visible in the finished object. You can look through the skin to see the light bouncing around inside the anatomical structures that make up an ear, and in the data paintings you see the ghostly forms in the distance through air, or perhaps across water, which is itself richly concoted of colourful slivers and streaks as precise as a surgical incision.
Even with the luscious colours, there's something almost uncanny about both the body parts and the buildings (if that's what they are). In both, layers seem to be almost on the point of dissolving, as if it's only our scrutiny that's keeping them from peeling apart. Perhaps we aren't far away from a Gothic sensibility.
The buildings are carefully and painstakingly composed, but
there are blood-red trails in their reflections. The pair of ears are hotly pulsing with life despite being unattached to any body. In the satirical pencil drawing, the complex roof of a glass building drawn in classic, rational perspective rests on top of furious faces merging nightmarishly into one another and into more disembodied ears.
For all their technical control, both the data and the body paintings show us forms hovering on the edge of coming apart, and that's where the drama of these unsettling images lies.
