Guy Peppin - Artist Statement 2008
Fragminis: (Latin, noun) a breaking; fragments, remains, ruins.
This year through a process of experimentation I have let go of the more literal and pictorial modes of representation, moving into the crossroads of abstraction. Ideas of the promise of ruin, the uncanny, material diffusion, destruction and iconoclasm are at the forefront of my work, which deals with dispersion, erasure and memory. I am engaged with the exploration of the material relationships involved in creation and destruction, re-interlacing image making and image breaking.
I have come to believe that in every good work of art there is a hint of decay, and without this element of vanitas, art is kitsch, or sentimental; as the author Henry James wrote in Italian hours: "To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure I confess, shows a note of perversity."
I am dealing with the play of traditional, rational grid structure against imaginative colour and inexpert craft, this is the classical dialectic in the history of thought: reason vs. passion, head vs. heart, tension vs. release, id vs. superego, Apollonian vs. Dionysian. Using a loose grid I am developing a personal practice of studying the effects of permanence eroded by change, time and breaking down which is inherent in nature.
My work is something like nomadic textiles in that it is unconstrained and unframed, reminiscent of indigenous craft and in its authenticity and therefore versatile, but reliant on hanging. I would like to make art that presents itself as anonymous, an art larger then myself, almost architectural. with the artist disappearing behind the work.
I want to express deep emotions through simple forms or colour poems that take us beyond the forms of everyday life. I see my work as an invitation to a conversation, a dialogue through colours and forms, talking of regularity and irregularity, marriage and divorce, harmony and disharmony, unity and separation, community and isolation, spiritual energy and sensuality, but also uncertainty as to what they are and what they mean. I have explored and dispensed with pictorial modes of representation in a similar way to the artists Sean Scully and Ellsworth Kelly. Sean Scully said: These things are not beautiful relatively, like other things, but always and naturally and absolutely."
My work has become a compression of form, edge, weight and colour. The verging stripes of architectonic canvas have become more physical and more honest, my geometry and colour has become more intense, with torn nervous edges. I have been making assemblages of different paintings torn into strips, these were reshuffled and reassembled. The planarity and of these stripes creates a moment of visual tension, where the conflict of mark and linear field is read by the viewer, who is exposed to liminal thresholds with which we read the fragmentation.
The challenge in the conception of these works was to be classical without being classicist and timeless, without being aloof. My work is now concentrating on making without being ritualistic, and connected to natural materials without fetishising them. Within this process randomness; arbitrary relationships and automatism are at work.
Having come from a background that is very embracing of technology, I see making art in this manner as a personal antidote to the increasingly depersonalising nature of our contemporary society. The flatter and more seductive the digital screen, the more I want to make human, natural surfaces; with joy, awe, delicacy, texture, vigour and power.
