These new works occupy a threshold between physical matter and imagined space. The canvas operates as both an architectural enclosure and a physical body while the painted image echoes this duality. The work emerges from an interest in early Western medical theory and spatial representation - pairings of body, mind and environment found in the theory of four humours on one hand and the symbolic use of linear perspective on the other. The new canvases distill a notion of the interior into a schematic framework suspended in a cumulative topography of paint.
The surfaces are built through a choreography of layers and applications - rolled, sponged, sprayed, and glazed - creating saturated textures that are sedimented, cellular and fractured. Layered fields of colour bleed into each other, while in the larger works a linear brick grid drops over the scene like a screen, complicating the division between what is inside and what is out. In some, space is filled with domestic and material motifs: simulated wood grain, textile stripes, and tile patterns that ornament the flat truth of the canvas and challenge the mind’s desire for depth. Here, walls or rooms are not static places, but a series of planes in which visual texture acts as a flattening boundary, a skin of active memory.
Flanking these spaces are small tondo works of a traced hand. Drawing on the ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ an experiment which points to the brain’s capacity to feel its way into a proxy body, the works are a nod to the act of drawing or painting itself: a sensory loop where the mind projects a physical reality into an illusionistic space, testing the boundaries of what is felt, what is seen, and what is imagined.
-Patrick Howlett
