Light for Company
Freya Douglas-Morris
9 January – 12 February
PV: 8 January 6-8:30PM
Away from a world of fast, sharp focused images we are invited into a drift of figures located within an elsewhere of this excess. Not that the work suggests a critique of this condition but rather is a byway passage into what might never be shown. Invariably such a schema points towards repression of everyday life but in these paintings there is no such sense and this is where the association with drifting enters. With this the eye is afforded time to linger, relax into tone, play with correspondence, delight in shifting modulations of texture and colour, pull back into a scanning of the image and even curl back within upon the fold of the afterlife of imaginative dwelling within interior recess.
If we ask why painting endures as a counter intuition of the technological saturated image reality it might be because it mines the diffuse pockets of unprocessed moods and imaginative probes that otherwise lay dormant. Even within the disarticulated time of the contemporary edge there are gestural reserves of other strata that remind of archaic or deep time and such gestures are open for collection if the brush moves slowly enough. Perhaps not enough attention is given to such things as painting in which the brush moves slowly enough in order to occasion the linger afterlife of things. Who knows? Certainly these paintings are removed from the concern for knowing enough, rather they are a surrender to affect. Certain questions hover though. Does the ground of these paintings imply a shift within a sense of ground, and if so, is all such perspective suspended anyway? What is clear is these paintings do not set out to create resolve but sink back into the conditions they modulate within their own process of becoming.