Completed Painting: 'Untitled 8 (Constructed City)'

 

'Untitled 8 (Constructed City)', Acrylics on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2020

'Untitled 8' is the next in my current run of 'Constructed City' paintings, having just sneaked in, under the wire as the last piece to be completed in 2020.  It's pleasing to what degree my productivity accelerated towards the end of what was, in so many other aspects of life, such a frustrating year.  

As the unimaginative titles, and common formats suggest, these recent paintings represent yet another of my customary series, at least nominally.  However, it does occur to me that there is perhaps a little more variance between individual pieces, in the manner of execution and general approach - at least, this time round.  That's okay, though.  I'm going to resist the usual temptation to over-analyse about such matters, and to just allow each new piece to unfold in whichever way feels most natural - for the time being at least.

In this case, the painting began with the deliberate recycling (at a larger scale) of one of the digitally-derived motifs from '5' and '6'.  However, whilst that is still just about discernible in the final image, the relative clarity of those earlier images was soon lost within a situation of increasingly layered complexity.  It seems that some kind of oscillation between a search for  distilled simplification, and an opposing tendency towards a degree of baffling intricacy, might be a general trend in these pieces.  And - if nothing else, that does feel like a valid analogy for the way in which unified architectural forms gradually emerge from a visual chaos of scaffolding, steelwork and interlocking planes, in the construction sites that trigger this body of work.  It's also worth noting that I'm pretty pleased with the way that any sense of figure and ground are pretty much subsumed within each other, here.

I suppose the renewed complexity here might feel like a slightly retrograde lurch back in the direction of 'Untitled 3', or even of some wholly abstract paintings composed of layered horizontal bands, from many years back.  However, it also feels like this is a much stronger painting than either of those examples.  A bit of progress is all I ask for, really.