Guy Peppin - Return to Sender 2009. 11 July - 6 August 2009 Liverpool Street Gallery. Opening drinks with the artist Thursday 16th July 2009 6-8pm. www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au
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Guy Peppin Return to Sender 11 July – 6 August 2009
Opening drinks with the artist Thursday 16 July 2009, 6-8pm
The body of work in Return to Sender functions as a series of unreadable, ‘impossible’ letters: the scribbled and tactile surfaces contain private, hidden ruminations to friends and family, irrespective of time and place, at home and abroad, living and dead. The works are an introspective, epistolary response to personal relationships, history and culture – moments of condensed creativity in the studio. They contain elements of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, placing the works into the expanded field of contemporary practice.
Language is the basis of the work; they are handwriting as art, correspondence as image. The canvases are palimpsests of obfuscations and submerged excisions acting as liminal, poetic mindscapes that evoke rather than describe the subject. Art being, obliquely a kind of confession.
My work concentrates on making without being ritualistic and connecting to materials without fetishising them. I enjoy the tactility of applying paint directly; I use my fingers, a pencil or a sharp stick, scraffito, smearing, pouring or splashing the paint onto the surface, letting it run wherever it may. I have also used materials that come to hand including natural charcoal, ashes and earth pigments.
Layers of paint and marks are laid down, and then whitewashed in a continuing process of creation and erasure. The works are shredded and reassembled, resulting in legible words or marks being rendered illegible or fragmented for the viewer. In the process of reassembling the torn strips of canvas, the marks become scattered and seemingly random within this now overlapping and horizontal plane.
The newly formed horizontal stripes are a compression of nervous, frayed edges – they do not deny their physicality. The juxtaposition of the lyrical marks against the stripes’ horizontality on a linear field creates moments of visual tension; the fragmented work is read as a limitative state. This process of creation, erasure and fragmentation ensures ambiguity, and with no possible acknowledgement from the subject. The works remain as transitional objects, potent yet inert as in-between spaces of a transitional threshold.
Here one views a contradiction of art as confession; the intended recipient will never, ever have the opportunity to read the original letter. What freedom this invites.
Sincerely— Guy Peppin
Liverpool Street Gallery 243a Liverpool Street East Sydney NSW 2010 Australia
T. +61 2 8353 7799 F. +61 2 8353 7798 info@liverpoolstgallery.com.au
Guy Peppin - Return to Sender 2009. 11 July - 6 August 2009 Liverpool Street Gallery. Opening drinks with the artist Thursday 16th July 2009 6-8pm. www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au
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Guy Peppin Return to Sender 11 July – 6 August 2009
Opening drinks with the artist Thursday 16 July 2009, 6-8pm
The body of work in Return to Sender functions as a series of unreadable, ‘impossible’ letters: the scribbled and tactile surfaces contain private, hidden ruminations to friends and family, irrespective of time and place, at home and abroad, living and dead. The works are an introspective, epistolary response to personal relationships, history and culture – moments of condensed creativity in the studio. They contain elements of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, placing the works into the expanded field of contemporary practice.
Language is the basis of the work; they are handwriting as art, correspondence as image. The canvases are palimpsests of obfuscations and submerged excisions acting as liminal, poetic mindscapes that evoke rather than describe the subject. Art being, obliquely a kind of confession.
My work concentrates on making without being ritualistic and connecting to materials without fetishising them. I enjoy the tactility of applying paint directly; I use my fingers, a pencil or a sharp stick, scraffito, smearing, pouring or splashing the paint onto the surface, letting it run wherever it may. I have also used materials that come to hand including natural charcoal, ashes and earth pigments.
Layers of paint and marks are laid down, and then whitewashed in a continuing process of creation and erasure. The works are shredded and reassembled, resulting in legible words or marks being rendered illegible or fragmented for the viewer. In the process of reassembling the torn strips of canvas, the marks become scattered and seemingly random within this now overlapping and horizontal plane.
The newly formed horizontal stripes are a compression of nervous, frayed edges – they do not deny their physicality. The juxtaposition of the lyrical marks against the stripes’ horizontality on a linear field creates moments of visual tension; the fragmented work is read as a limitative state. This process of creation, erasure and fragmentation ensures ambiguity, and with no possible acknowledgement from the subject. The works remain as transitional objects, potent yet inert as in-between spaces of a transitional threshold.
Here one views a contradiction of art as confession; the intended recipient will never, ever have the opportunity to read the original letter. What freedom this invites.
Sincerely— Guy Peppin
Liverpool Street Gallery 243a Liverpool Street East Sydney NSW 2010 Australia
T. +61 2 8353 7799 F. +61 2 8353 7798 info@liverpoolstgallery.com.au
Posted 9 months ago & Filed under guypeppin, art, abstraction, guy peppin, liverpool street gallery, sydney art, sydney, australia, poetry, etchings, printmaking,
