Inventory – All I know about painting 2010

date > January 2011
media > mixed media, printed material, cotton wool and nails
status > please email

> The latest installation of Inventory is part of the group exhibition Colour at Bedlam Gallery, London, which celebrates the use of colour in contemporary art.

> Inventory – All I know about painting 2010 started in 2008 as a diary of my arbitrary use of colour while painting a large canvas. Every time I have changed the colour on my brush, I painted a label, dated in pencil. Subsequently I added to this diary by painting a label with every type of painterly mark I could think of in each type of paint media I had at my disposal. Finally I cut out magazines, postcards, gallery invites and exhibition catalogues to add all the marks by other artists I had looked at. The resulting Inventory fails because it can never be complete and evokes as much the rich repertoire at the artist’s disposal as it does the limits of a scientific mode of inquiry and of human understanding. My mode of working is thus marked both by how painting seduces me by its infinite complexity and by my desire to hold the subject at arm’s length and make it the object of a pseudo-scientific form of enquiry.

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