"he has turned the paintings so many times, has made them gyrate so quickly, that their phantoms unravel as photographs..." (Alexander García Düttmann, 2010)
My practice revolves around the experience of art, the visual realm, and the ghosts of art history, using photography to reveal the unbound plasticity of art. In my Annunciations series, Renaissance paintings are taken as a starting point, from which I attempt to extract, distill and trace the essential element, the 'excess' that embodies the autonomous affect of the image. I begin by plotting the line that charts a painting's chromatic densities, throwing and spinning this around, before moulding a physical three-dimensional object from the resultant form. A photographic waltz is then enacted, an extraction, to coax out a presence through optical epiphany; an astigmatic kiss with that which lies beyond vision, a realisation of the distinct, the image.
Echoing the peculiar bilboquets that crop up in the landscapes of Magritte's imaginings, or the pawn-shaped bachelors of Duchamp's Large Glass, my processes attempt to be simultaneously grounded in the analytical, aleatory and subjective, utilising elements of painting, sculpture, mathematics and photography. This leads to an abstruse framework for production that sets out to undermine its own methodology in order to probe the paradoxical characteristics of the autonomous image, and to reveal the alchemical nature of the formless object of art itself.
