Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y007

 

All Images: Central Leicester, January 2021

Here the glistening ramp inclines towards a portion of secret space - stacked in one of the city's overlooked interstices.  Several such zones exist, enfolding more dimensions than any standard topographical reading might encompass.  Beyond the heraldic barr, the way is delineated in gold, and canopied on cadmium pillars - switching internal to external, before coiling out of sight.

Our understanding of such places remains problematic - even following repeat visits.  Time slows, and may become suspended altogether.  It can only be productively spent beyond the walls.  Inside, memory may fail, and familiar connections become loosened.  Stasis reigns.  Abandonment is key.  We might discard standard purposes within this circuit, create strange new dreams, or pass away a lifetime within it.  And yet such longing is sternly discouraged.  Apprehension remains a possibility even though the wardens stay hidden.

   

Remote and perpetually watchful - the entire edifice operates as a paranoid accumulator.  Slowing seconds tick through monitor displays and hidden cables.  Shadow multiplies - thickening in angles.  Admission is conditional, and a fear of imprisonment prevails until the moment of release.  Brutality may be postponed, but return is inevitable.

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004.1 (Second Encounter)

 

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004.1, West Leicester, February 2021

The second manifestation took place beyond a span of lost conveyance.  Transport froze, and few now sought out this route in commerce.  The ceremonial way still glistening from within submerged shadow, but the cherished zone beyond now churned amidst massive upheaval.  The lands beyond that portal had become a disputed tract where emerging edifices vied for resident dominance.  A thousand blank eyes opened upon the world, enmeshed for now in matrices too complex for analysis.

The traditional rituals of cellulose and steel were still observed in their reeking caves - but  desperate now, and grown increasingly peripheral.  How long could such rites prevail amidst the new demographic?  Old concentrations of part-worn devotion had been cleared away, and the donor stacks demolished.  Hopes of Recovery faded as the new modes regenerated on a fresh footing.  "Be part of something new".  The sediment tower was dismantled overnight.  The vantage point was surrendered amidst snow and mud - topographical oversight suddenly denied.

In such a region, the old drift felt threatened.  Access remained conjectural.  The routes of desire were curtailed and channelled - clotted now with machine prints and threaded through a polychromatic labyrinth.  Those old reams faded amongst the fences, even though the wind still blew.  The occasional seditious exhortation was stencilled over the sanctioned scrawl.  Plywood bulletins prioritised cartoon escape, despite that small yearning for rigour amidst placatory multi-fades.  Doubtless, The Revolution would not be live-streamed.  The barricades were now reversed - and would be dismantled soon enough, in any case.  The official version  was printed elsewhere - blandly aspirational and impervious beneath a sheen of laminate. 

That this new encounter should occur in such a transactional landscape must surely have come as no surprise - even if the motives remain obscure.  Could those livid moulded grids portend a new annexation, where time is made static and crated - or else, some unplanned and unimagined egress become available?  Might fresh dreams short-circuit the new geometries? 

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 13 (Constructed City)'

 

'Untitled 13 (Constructed City)', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape, French Polish,
Aerosol Paint & Ballpoint Pen on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2021

I'm not generally in the habit of obliterating finished paintings.  That's certainly not to claim everything is deemed 100% successful (far from it).  However, I'll normally take a piece through as many iterations as seem necessary to resolve it - often setting something aside for a while pending subsequent revisions, or completely abandoning those pieces that just won't work out.  But occasionally, something gets 'released' in a state I subsequently decide I just can't live with.  So it has proved to be with 'Untitled 6 (Constructed City)' - a painting that hung on my wall (somewhat reproachfully) for around three months, but is now effectively deleted.  I wanted to believe I was satisfied with it, but ultimately had to recognise it just wouldn't do.  Actually, I suspect the desire to call something 'finished' simply overtook my better judgement over something that didn't really work.

'Untitled 5 (Constructed City)': No Longer Extant

As a result, I recently decided to revise the painting.  However, my tinkering still failed to deliver the resolution I was seeking.  Instead, a completely new painting on the same panel became the only viable course of action - the result being 'Untitled13' (Constructed City)'.  I'll admit I toyed with the idea of titling this one '6.1' , but as there really is nothing of the original image left, the idea of a new 'remix' doesn't really apply.  Instead, this new image is so obviously the sibling of '11' and '12', that it seems preferable to capitalise on the sense of forward motion, and to simply let '6'  slide as a gap in the sequence.  Which is the least healthy impulse, I wonder - a neurotic desire to tie-up every loose end, or this constant need to show my working?

Of course (current technology being what it is), our footprints are no longer fully erased.  Having once entered the public arena (however obscurely), '6' can continue to haunt this body of work as a digital memory - and to possibly provoke the occasional self indulgent meditation on the tension between the virtual and the 'real'.  I won't pretend I don't enjoy these attempts to apply a kind of digitally-informed sensibility to something as archaic and material as the tradition of painting.

Significant Yellow Items: #2021.Y005 & #2021.Y006

 

Significant Yellow Item: #2021,Y005, West Leicester, February 2021

Beneath, the aggressive annexation of caged space continues.  Meanwhile - at the kerb, the standard territorial disputes prevail.

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y006, February 2021

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 12 (Constructed City)'

 

'Untitled 12 (Constructed City)', Acrylics, Screen Print, Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape,
Spray Paint, French Polish & Pencil on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2021

Here's my twelfth 'Untitled (Constructed City)' painting.  The deep involvement with all things yellow continues, whilst the greater layered complexity and overlapping meshes of '11', is pushed further still.  Whilst this is largely the result of a more improvisational approach, the digitally pre-determined (and serially recycled) motifs of earlier iterations, still float across the surface.

To my mind, much of the satisfying tension in these images stems from these nominally foreground elements being derived from shards of negative space in the source construction site images.  This feels magnified as the illusion of pictorial space deepens behind them.

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004

 

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004, Southeast Leicester, January 2021

First contact was made on a bleak day, amongst the city's sweated southeastern tracts.  Overlooked by grim, mal-audited fortresses of piecework, the street itself was an entropic backwater of scattered debris - long drained of energy.  We were already deep into the current emergency, but official restrictions remain of little consequence in such zones.  Consequently, the constant  shift patterns remain unbroken, transmitting one unto another in fulfilment of the contract.  The encounter was soundtracked by a subdued machine clatter, syrupy orchestration and that familiar cinematic wailing, typical of the territory.  Dim illumination perspired from diseased tubes, behind greasy windows, on those occupied storeys.  In the street, the cold was a windless, steady-state fact - bitter and irrefutable.       

We can only speculate about the selection of such a setting.  Motivations remain obscure at the best of times, and the correct context is (as is commonly recognised), essential.  What does seem certain is that an insertion of such high visibility could only have been performed in order to manifest some small release of parallel reality.  The precision-moulded grids and structural intricacies employed, speak of a technology far in advance of our own - as could seen by comparison with other primitive stacked structures that littered the scene.  But it is the chromatic physics of the self-coloured enclosure which really place it outside everyday optical constraints as currently understood.  In the prevailing conditions, it was impossible to comprehend how these wavelengths of light could operate amidst such despondency.  Might even an entirely divergent system of physics be in operation?      

That the artefact should act as a receptacle for routine detritus was  a notable incongruity, even on that most quotidian of days.  Despite its shored-up and expedient surroundings, basic  opportunistic practicality seems inappropriate to its crisp geometry and concentrated radiance.  Such a yellow appears to exceed mere function.  Taking this into account, and also reflecting upon the distinctly artificial off-kilter positioning - the overriding impression is, once more, of some manifestation having been deliberately secreted in plain site.

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 11 (Constructed City)'

 

'Untitled 11 (Constructed City)', Acrylics, Screen Print, Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape,
French Polish, Ink, Spray Paint  & Pencil on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2021

Here's the eleventh 'Constructed City' painting, and the first to be completed in 2021.  Like a lot of other things on here just recently, it's self consciously yellow - with chromatic reference to the saturated and hi-vis primaries often seen on the construction sites that inspire these pieces.

The photographically and digitally-derived motifs floating across the surface are a little sparser this time, whilst the collaged layers of information behind them are far denser and more nuanced than previously.  The balancing of those two tendencies feels like something of a step forward - as does the greater intrusion of overlapping meshes that provide a systematic form of compositional scaffolding.

In keeping with my current habit of having several in progress at once - there's another one, following close behind.  It looks like that will be significantly yellow too.  We'll see...