Completed Painting: '[dc]circuit 01/Sartre'

 

'[dc]circuit 01/Sartre', Acrylics, Mixed Media & Paper Collage on Panel,
600 mm x 400 mm, 2026

For some months, I've been working simultaneously on five panels, designed to be viewed together as a set. All five are now finished to the same level, so it's finally time to go public with them. Here's the first, entitled, '[dc]circuit 01/Sartre.' I'll admit that's a fairly arch title (and possibly a rip-off of the kind of labelling Aphex Twin might employ), but it does offer some clues about what's going on here.

In general aesthetic and overall methodology, these five clearly belong with the other 'Deleuzian Cartography' pieces I've produced in recent times. Hence the initial '[dc]' identifier. In fact they grew out of the 'Deleuzian Cartography 6' panel I completed last summer, with each of the electrical lighting circuit diagrams collected in that piece acting individually as a dominant motif here each time. 'circuit 01 - 05' thus becomes the sub-series identifier for these five panels.

The alternative appelation, '/Sartre', relates to the fact that each of these pieces also alludes to an individual author and/or philosopher of importance to me. All were prominent on my personal reading list duringb the period when these paintings were in progress. Some years back, I produced a series of map-based paintings in which cartographic fragments combined with found texts to signify my physical and mental journeys around my local patch, here in Leicester. Those pieces featured in an exhibition titled 'Mental Mapping' which I shared with Andrew Smith. That title (suggested by Andrew) seemed to describe what I was trying to do very well, and in reality, it still does. My hope is that these more recent cartographic mash-ups are a little more sophisticated in certain ways (albeit, somewhat more restrained), but it's definitely the case that I'm still trying to construct a form of subverted cartography, in synthesis with multiple over-codings of potential meanings/narrative. It seems that the found texts I harvested from the physical environment back then are now replaced by the literary texts I routinely carry around with me these days (usually in anticipation of yet another coffee stop). 

Much of the territory I'm obsessively dismantling and reassembling still relates to my local environment, but buried in there are also maps of various locations significant to the five featured writers. As this first one pays homage to Jean-Paul Sartre, the terrain of Leicester's 'everyday' zones become entangled with the street maps of Saint Germain (his intellectual H.Q.) and Le Harvre (as reimagined in his philosophical novel 'Nausea' [1.]). 

As far as the circuits themselves are concerned, beyond their obvious geometric/emblematic appeal, they're pretty straightforward signifiers for the various energy flows constituting any urban environment. As such, they could be said to chart the city, just as the maps do. However, given that each diagram relates to a specific LED lighting circuit, perhaps they also hint that all  those slightly dog-eared and ring-stained paperbacks are probably the nearest I'll ever get to anything resembling genuine illumination. 

There is one other point of note with these five panels, relating to the identifying colours used each time. However, I'll save that insight until the others have revealed themselves. For now, let's just say that the Sartre-related panel was always going to be done in existentialist black(ish), wasn't it?

[1.]: Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Nausea', (Trans. Robert Baldick), London/NYC, Penguin, 1963 (1938).

Sans A.1.

Ex_ist 3 [Beer & Now]

All images: West Leicester, March 2025

“Now there are objects everywhere like this glass of beer, here on the table. When I see it, I feel like saying: ‘Pax, I’m not playing any more.’ I realise perfectly well that I have gone too far. I don’t suppose you can ‘make allowances’ for solitude. That doesn’t mean that I look under my bed before going to sleep or that I’m afraid of seeing the door of my room open suddenly in the middle of the night. All the same, I am ill at ease: for half an hour I have been avoiding looking at this glass of beer. I look above, below, right and left: but the glass itself I don’t want to see. And I know very well that all the bachelors around me can’t help me in any way: it is too late, and I can no longer take refuge amongst them. They would come and slap me on the back and say to me: ‘well, what’s special about that glass of beer? It’s  just like all the others. It’s bevelled, and it has a handle and a little coat of arms with a spade on it, and on the coat of arms is written Spatenbrau.’ I know all that , but I know that there’s something else. Almost nothing. But I can no longer explain what I see. To anybody. There it is: I am gently slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear.” [1.]

[1.]:  Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Nausea’ (Trans. Robert Baldick), London/NYC, Penguin, 1963 (1938).

Ex_ist 1 [Sartreian Spring]

 

All Images: South Leicester, March 2024

“…I started laughing because I suddenly thought of the wonderful springtimes described in books, full of cracking, bursting gigantic blossomings. There were fools who talked  to you about willpower and the struggle for life Hadn’t they ever looked at an animal or a tree? That plane with its scaling bark, that half-rotten oak - they would’ve wanted me to take them for vigorous youthful forces thrusting towards the sky. And that root? I would probably have had to see it as a greedy claw, tearing the earth, snatching its food from it.

‘Impossible to see things that way. Weaknesses, frailties, yes. The trees were floating. Thrusting towards the sky? Collapsing rather: at any moment I expected to see the trunks shrivel like weary pricks, curl up and fall to the ground in a soft, black, crumpled heap. They did not want to exist, only they could not help it; that was the point. So they performed all their little functions, quietly, unenthusiastically, the sap rose slowly and reluctantly in the canals, and the roots penetrated slowly into the earth. But at every moment they seemed on the verge of dropping everything and obliterating themselves. Tired and old, they went on existing, unwillingly and ungraciously, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could come to them only from the outside: melodies alone can proudly carry their own death within them like an internal necessity,; only they don’t exist. Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. I leaned back ands I closed my eyes. But pictures, promptly informed, sprang forward and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a repletion which man can never abandon.” [1.]

“Did I dream it up, that huge presence? It was there, installed on the park, tumbled into the trees, all soft, gumming everything up, all thick, a jelly. And I was inside with the whole of the park? I was frightened, but above all I was furious, I thought it was so stupid, so out of place, I hated that ignoble jelly. A there was so much of it, so much! It went up as high as the sky, it flowed away everywhere, it filled everything with gelatinous subsidence and I could see it going deeper and deeper, far beyond the limits of the park and the houses and Bouville, I was no longer at Bouville or anywhere, I was floating. I was not surprised. I knew perfectly well that it was the World, the World in all its nakedness which was suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with fury at that huge absurd being. You couldn’t even wonder where it all came from, or how it was that a world should exist rather than nothing. It didn’t make sense, the world was present everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had been no moment at which it might not have existed. It was that which irritated me: naturally there was no reason for it to exist, that flowing larva. But it was not possible for it not to exist. That was unthinkable: In order to imagine nothingness, you had to be there already, right in the world, with your eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was just an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in that immensity: this nothingness hadn’t come before existence, it was an existence like any other and one which had appeared after a great many others. I shouted: ‘What filth! What filth!’ And I shook myself to get rid of that sticky dirt, but it held fast and there was so much of it, tons and tons of existence, indefinitely: I was suffocating at the bottom of that huge boredom. Then, all of a sudden, the park emptied as if through a big hole, the world disappeared in the same way it had come, or else I woke up - in any case I could not see it any more; there remained some yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches stuck up into the air.” [2.]

“Dusk is falling, the first lights are going on in the town. Good Lord, how natural the town looks in spite of all its geometric patterns, how crushed by the evening it seems. It’s so …obvious from here; is it possible that I should be the only one to see it? Is there nowhere another Cassandra on top of a hill, looking down at a town engulfed in the depths of Nature? But what does it matter to me? What could I possibly tell her?

“My body turns very gently towards the east, wobbles slightly and starts walking.” [3.]

[1, 2, 3]:  Excerpts From: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Nausea’ (Trans. Robert Baldick), London/NYC, Penguin, 1963 (1938).