Stock still side by side 2023 – 200 x 200cm, oil on canvas
A yellow diagonal now cuts corner to corner across a large square canvas, dividing a painterly industrial-pastoral landscape, smoke stack, pale sky, scrubby ground, from what appears to be a calibration chart, a printer’s test pattern, the kind of colour-verification grid that appears on the margins of print runs before the actual image begins. Sunflowers grow in front of both zones, indifferent to the ontological divide between the painted and the schematic.
The painting functions as a meditation on representation itself: the sunflower is on both sides of the cut, equally present in the believable landscape and in the field of pure colour information. What does it mean to witness when the ground of witness is itself unstable? When reality and its administrative representation coexist as parallel surfaces that do not resolve into each other?