Circles
I am interested in the environment as a place filled with semiotic messages that compete for attention. The places we can touch are shaped by history, corporate activity and the interventions of individuals seeking a forum for self-expression. Even the places we cannot touch have meanings imposed on them through speculation, images and poetic interpretation.
Painting is at one pole of this exploration and is where it is at its most abstract. I also use other media, including text and photography. The paintings are usually process-based and shift between pure abstraction and allusions to environmental textures, colours and atmospheres, sampled and explored within a geometric shape. That shape is quite often a circle, for its neutral, democratic qualities. The physical and cultural environments that art itself occupies are also significant in this, and important but peripheral materials such as gesso, varnish and non-art media are often foregrounded in the work.
The geometric qualities of the surfaces and motifs are often in tension with the tactile, irregular qualities of the paint and, for me, this suggests a kind of poetic reference to the endless negotiation in human existence between order and chaos or restriction and liberation.
As with the environment, each painting is a site of production, erosion, removal and repair; ‘healing’, some might say. Each one comes to a stage where the endeavour has reached some form of balance and point of closure, rather than a series of conclusive implications. In something so abstract it must remain for others to determine what the work means for them. However, amongst the impulses that drive it is a belief in the beauty, humanity and inevitability of the uncertain, the imperfect and the obverse.
Stephen Riley 2007
Painting is at one pole of this exploration and is where it is at its most abstract. I also use other media, including text and photography. The paintings are usually process-based and shift between pure abstraction and allusions to environmental textures, colours and atmospheres, sampled and explored within a geometric shape. That shape is quite often a circle, for its neutral, democratic qualities. The physical and cultural environments that art itself occupies are also significant in this, and important but peripheral materials such as gesso, varnish and non-art media are often foregrounded in the work.
The geometric qualities of the surfaces and motifs are often in tension with the tactile, irregular qualities of the paint and, for me, this suggests a kind of poetic reference to the endless negotiation in human existence between order and chaos or restriction and liberation.
As with the environment, each painting is a site of production, erosion, removal and repair; ‘healing’, some might say. Each one comes to a stage where the endeavour has reached some form of balance and point of closure, rather than a series of conclusive implications. In something so abstract it must remain for others to determine what the work means for them. However, amongst the impulses that drive it is a belief in the beauty, humanity and inevitability of the uncertain, the imperfect and the obverse.
Stephen Riley 2007