Creasing Up...

Courtesy of the workplace access to particular resources, in this case the handful of visual arts journals to which are subscribed, the freshly-arrived March (& 100th) issue of ‘Art of England’ includes a most interesting feature on the latest work by Mat Collishaw, soon to be exhibited at Blain|Southern in London.
‘This is Not an Exit’ features oil paintings based upon the source material of folded scraps of paper, torn from ‘lifestyle’ publications, such objects then lit & photographed to provide the visual references to be enlarged greatly in scale for the execution of the paintings. The subject of the paintings is the void experienced post-cocaine ‘hit’, the folded papers being in fact used as cocaine wrappers (which apparently have their own particular geometry of folds in order to function effectively as packages), but it’s this folded paper object, referencing our old friend the modernist grid of course, with subtle & more dramatic tonal shifts, represented as two dimensional surface, especially via the medium of oil paint, that particularly interests me, as does Collishaw originally finding inspiration in the form of a folded rail ticket, relating as this does to my own explorations of folded & lightly crumpled pieces of paper, primarily in/for themselves but initially also incorporating printed imagery, in a small series of drawings made during October & November 2010, with a further couple of examples from last January.

Also recently featured in ‘Art of England’ (the January edition) was Keith Coventry & his latest ‘Junk Paintings’, their ‘readymade’ formal imagery sourced from found discarded flattened McDonald’s packaging, with its branded identity consequently reconfigured, thus relating in some way(s) (at least as source subject-object matter) to the so-called ‘readymade Cubism’ of those found ‘roadkill’ aluminium drinks cans I formerly collected & drew from for some considerable time during 2009 & 2010 & which led, eventually, coincidentally, to the drawings of crumpled paper sheets.