Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 3'

'Deleuzian Cartography 3', Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel,
300 mm x 300 mm, 2024

This is the third of this year's small ‘Deleuzian Cartography’ panels. It came into being in parallel with ‘DC2’ and I suppose they share a certain aesthetic - in colour range, if nothing else. The fragmented street maps and circuit diagrams are still there, although much of that content is even further subsumed into an ‘all-over’ composition this time.

For much of the piece’s development, I figured that might be the whole story, and that this one was going to represent a variety of urban hum approaching near blankness, rather than the more strident energy flows of the streets. Somehow though, this just wasn’t quite enough and a recognisable portion of Leicester’s inner gyratory system rose to the surface very late in the day. The final gesture of reaching for a pot of varnish and looping it off the handle of a brush occurred in wholly intuitive manner (late at night, and probably half asleep). It is often the case that such release creates the most fortuitous results, and in this time the drips appear to continue the ring road’s circuit organically through sheer chance. I couldn’t have made that happen if I’d tried.

Without delving to dee eply into any of the complex, abstruse philosophical concepts which may (or may not) inform this body of work, the tension between formally established territory and more intuitive flows of urban life continue to feel like a key theme. Indeed, this may just represent another interpretation of the official/unofficial interface that’s been there in my work for many years (signage vs graffiti, crisp edges vs random mark-making, social democracy vs uninformed reactionary politics, etc.).

Another point worth noting is the suggestion of some pixellated, glitch-type artefact at bottom left of this image. There was actually more of this in ‘DC1’, and it does feel like another category of motif that may continue to recur in this body of work. For now, let’s simply regard it as a hint towards the digital lens through which we often chart the terrain. I’ll leave it at that for now, but the potential of Google Maps/Earth, OpenStreetMap, etc. to further mediate our understanding of geography is definitely folded into these pieces, and something to discuss at greater length another time