Artist's
Statement – Speed and Scale
For the past several years my work has appropriated
the virtual aesthetic, combining the play of hand with the mathematically
calculated forms of the computer, to highlight the fluid border between the
artificial and the real.
In a series of paintings and drawings begun in 2004,
I depicted landscapes appropriated from “Gran Turismo”, a popular and highly sophisticated computer game.
Selected, cropped and abstracted from computer generated models of real places,
I created images representing an ultra-contemporary fantasy world, a place to
play without getting hurt.
These paintings deliberately employ
traditional materials; the oil, linen and varnish of the old masters, combined
with a sculptor’s attention to material.
The oil paint is
blurred together in horizontal strips, the images
built up not dot by dot, but strip by strip, more Epson or HP than Monet or Seurat. The surfaces
are very rough, and the final varnish glitters off the linen knots like
thousands of pixels. Custom-built wood
supports are carefully dimensioned so that the paintings have a sculptural
thickness, an explicitly object-like presence.
With “Three Cars” (2004) - the first painting to use
an appropriated video game landscape, I worked directly with the scan lines of
the video based image, to begin to develop a painterly language. The many paintings which followed led to
“Road” (2004) – where I began superimposing my own horizontal grid over the
image from the video screen, taking the video image’s scanned nature, and
playing with its speed and scale.
Speed and scale became a link to both realism and
reality. “The list of famous victories and horrifying
accidents is long” (2005), shows a group of dark trees by the side of an
infamous stretch of road on a racing circuit that has claimed many lives, and
the title is taken from the track’s own description on its official website.
Man-made fantasy and artifice continue as themes in
my latest work. My current series takes the virtual inspiration of the video
game landscape and applies it to paintings based on my own photographs of real
landscapes. “Roxy” (2007) references big wave surfing
where nature and danger are mastered in human competition. Grand naturalistic man-made landscapes are
used as the basis for “Tyburn” 2007, where the pond
of
The horizontal grid is applied with a scale that
reduces the sense of place to its essentials.
I mix wax with my pigments, producing a paint
both more slippery and more translucent.
As before, the wood supports are custom built to achieve a sculptural
thickness (the paintings are 3 inches thick with bare, unpainted, unprimed
sides) and I am now using a smooth canvas, the surface itself built up in
multiple layers to a complex matte finish.
My current work in the studio continues to develop
the themes of fantasy and artifice - scale and speed, realism and reality.
Simon Aldridge 2007