David Thomas: Impermanences

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BACKGROUND: The research was manifest as an exhibition of new paintings and photopaintings. I was invited to exhibit this body of work at Minus Space New York USA, a gallery of international reputation curated by Matthew Deleget and Rosanna Martinez. The gallery has a focus on contemporary international reductive painting and enables my researches to be seen in an international context. This work continues my research into monochrome painting, colour and gesture. This exhibition is informed by understandings of "the real" (matter and imagery) and questions ideas of abstract purity, formalism and materiality. It is informed by a discussion between eastern and western art movements of Concrete Art , Mono Ha and philosophy regarding ideas of, sympathy, simplicity and complexity informed also by Bergson's concept of the composite and duration. SIGNIFICANCE: Through my use of large scale photography, pictorial structure, wall painting, the materiality of paint, gesture, scale, the work asks the viewers to engage with discovery, fragility, transience, memory. Through juxtaposition and layering the work explores new ways to show how gesture, scale and colour can generate a sense of time, the felt and the known and how through timing enables experiences of attentive looking/ intimacy /interiority and exteriority /materiality/ surprise to be considered over/in time and space. CONTRUBUTION: In exploring the relationship of how painting manifests actual sensation and photography represents time past, the research has produced original artworks. These bring into focus new uses of the application of juxtapositions of scale, layering and colour. New combinations of abstraction and photography create complex content in simple form. Peer Review: The work was reviewed in NY based Musee magazine. http://museemagazine.com/culture/culture/art-out/david.