DRAWINGS 2021 AND EXPERIMENTAL ABSTRACTIONS
In this body of art, I was trying to absolve abstraction in the picture plane while relieving myself of the structural limitations of drawing on canvas. I quickly figured out that for my practice that the last line or reductive logic is that of the trace of movement or the gesture.
Throughout this process, I was finding out many things. In this context, drawing is a product of many processes of mark making that contains the fundamentals in drawing and handmade gestures. Essentially, I was self-illustrating the end space of drawing to its theoretical logic and the means of its visual aesthetic. The accumulation of layered gestures that was made using various grades of charcoal and graphite upon canvas was generating an image as the last type of mark making substance as image itself.
One of the simple questions I was working with pertaining to the drawings was knowing that there is no picture to intuitively arrive at, only found traces of imagery. The bridge between abstraction and image depiction was now at a resolute point. I felt free to leave these as drawings while not having to find them under the spectrum of Abstract works of art. This in turn opened the space for a logical progression in media exploration to find a sought-out image.
Throughout this process in macro intervals of drawing, I resorted to micro process based abstract image making. These works of art contained charcoal, paint, pastel, wood glue and other instances of provincial mark making media. This painting process was disparate in comparison to the drawing process, but it was a way for me to apply paint to the canvas without it being absolved by the logic of Drawing. These images turned out to look like reductive painting abstractions, that were filling in the spaces that are left blank in the composition of the drawings.
The last space for me was to let the work settle until I could find a resolute way to think about and articulate the concepts and theoretical stances which were being solidified in this body of work. Ideas such as “post – structural abstraction” and “deconstructivism and image making” were two places that the drawing and paintings allowed for logical contemplation to take place. After doing this the paintings simply resounded themselves as paintings and the drawings as drawings. I see this complex exhaustion of structures and mark making as necessary for my practice to sustain itself in longevity, instead of structural demise.
Furthermore, digital processes and interfaces began to logically work their ways into several small Abstractions that I was simultaneously working on as miniature connections between liminal spaces of pause and creation and vice versa. These smaller paintings are at play in image making and create a type of exhilarating dominating picture plane. This overdrive in dominance of paint as picture was something that I was looking for. For me it is important to find the subsect or style in which an art object is made.
So, for the latter paintings the figure and depth awareness became points of conceptual poignancy.
In conclusion, the Process as a developmental driving source in image making works of art and pictures can become the central space of Image occupation and the concrete space for making theoretically sound works of “Art” and concrete Drawings and Paintings.
