160604 Bubble, Samotryas and Supreme Tongue

Description

Brown liquid-like stains spread across the upper left and centre of a pale field, crossed by turquoise outlined loops and a red curved stroke. Thin grey linear marks and smaller coloured fragments extend toward the right.

04.06.16
mixed on canvas
90X120

Authorial Comment

The first ever appearance of the empty Bubble on our canvas.

Detail

A more methodical painting experiment made as the broad Future Dishes / early White Mold investigations were becoming a repeatable formal grammar, in a search for a surface that could remain open while being increasingly organised. Tea and bleach are explicitly remembered among the materials; the exact full material list remains unresolved.

This operation remains even when the geometric form disappears. In later painting the plane can be opened not by a cube, tube or cone but by fog, indeterminacy, a state in which the image seems about to appear but has not yet appeared. The means change, but the same problem remains: how to hold form at the moment of emergence, preventing it from finally closing into a sign or a stable image. Noise Index, White Mold, spatial forms and the later “fog” can therefore be understood not as separate stylistic periods but as a sequence of different instruments in the same work of opening form.

Related Works

White Mold

150812 Blinking-sportsmenSmall human figures are dispersed across a broad pale field of white, blue, pink and green washes. Their bodies remain legible amid loosely layered strokes, drips and partially erased colour.
150815 Future DishesA broad white field carries separated islands of blue, green, yellow, pink and brown paint. Small figurative fragments, sprayed passages and dripping marks remain discontinuous rather than combining into a single continuous scene.
160827 Aloof LoafA warm cream field is crossed by faint blue-grey and ochre passages, with a large thin white loop running through the centre. A small blue zigzag sits near the lower left and a dark-and-white circular element punctuates the lower right.