I’m very uneasy using some terms – spiritual is one; I cannot claim it, but it pokes at me. The irony of ‘Hard lines’ is more at one with my thinking. Exhibition and title engage in a standoff; the work is anything but hard, is it? Surface is as far as I could make it, unblemished, rich, spatial. Edges are clean. Graphite powder, artists pigment, rubbed onto paper, the rubbing and fixing working their way into the thing. It is not intellectual stuff. But its genesis was in some kind of intelligence? There is no brief, no statement , no sentence, and a cacophony of words.There are thoughts, shifts of balance, nerve endings thinking. Of course there is a history. It’s flat. It’s ‘minimal’. I don’t feel like a minimalist, or an abstract expressionist. Barnett Newman is mentioned. He is not there. Some stuff is quiet, still. There is movement too. Optical movement, spatial movement. ‘White Cube’ predominantly in greys and blacks, is lifted from a doorway in the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey.
I am a ‘glass half empty’ man. The task is to at least equal that which has gone, to equal it wordlessly, to not top-up with a head of froth.
Well, ‘….hard lines….’
