Lofty Branches...
A Lofty Story
On a summer day, I think it was August, in 2021 I went to visit the Palace of Bishop Erasmus Ciolek in Krakow – a branch of Krakow’s National Museum focused on sacred Middle Ages art of former Polish territories. I’d not been there before. I was standing in front of a 15th century Eastern Orthodox icon painting of Saint Paraskewa. The actual reason of my visit was to see an iteration of this particular icon, painted by Jerzy Nowosielski in 1974. Both icons are displayed side by side. My eyes were locked in on the original icon and I understood why Nowosielski had to paint it – I must have experienced something similar as in the coming weeks, months, years, I kept on thinking of how on earth I could steal it – how I could replicate in my work what I was experiencing in front of this icon. The painting in question is a hagiographic depiction of a figure of Saint Paraskewa with a margin of scenes from the saint’s life surrounding the central figure. It’s a fascinating concept of conflating different points in time and space, but also different ideas of how an image can function: as a device of storytelling, didactic narrative, and as a portal – transmitter of the divine.
Around a year later, I begun to paint 7 Years Bad Luck (2022-23, see in 'Recent'). Its composition and key elements are drawn out of Saint Paraskewa’s iconography: a constellation of rectangles with a large central one, from which smaller satellite ones extend out. A motherboard diagram. I was thinking of a void versus an image and whether I could pull this painting off without referring to imagery or narrative. The rectangles have nothing inside of them; at least nothing determinate other than marks and fields of colour. To me, the main event of this painting, are the ‘microcurrents’ filling the space between and around the rectangles; the micro-marks, suggestive of current-like movement, contracting and expanding. It occurred to me that these 'microcurrents' could constitute the entire painting and that I could extract the motherboard diagram beyond the stretcher bars.
The thinking process for Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There begun. A set of purely practical and logistical problems presented itself: what will I paint in each rectangle? What will they be made of? How will they respond to one another? Will they be connected, and if so how and with what? Will it exist as a single work?
It’s unlike any other painting of mine. It operates within a conceptual framework but also an intuitive, poetic approach to painting. Lofty reconciles a number of concerns I’ve been working with for several years: painting as an object that isn’t limited by its edges, the materiality and agency of the support, the concept of movement, space and time, the relationship with nature and how biological formations can transmute into mechanical systems. The fact that it conflates all these concerns makes it a very important work for me. Its physical structure follows that of an Eastern Orthodox concept of Iconostasis – an image bearing screen where icon paintings are hung, and their order can be reconfigured. The painting’s total dimensions are variable since the small panels can be arranged in various configurations and distances to the central painting. This means that in addition to the internal interaction of forces within each painting, external spatial and temporal interrelationships are instigated. All seven rectangles are variations on movement, space, and time, each panel exists within its own parameters but also in the context of the neighbouring paintings and the connecting time-tunnel threads. I think of them as seven different time zones existing in a super-zone out of time.
Is it a painting? I don’t want to think of it as a painting installation, there’s something reductive about it in this context. Perhaps 'a painting' will suffice.
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Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There
2024, oil on jute, oil on panel, jute fibres
220 x 180 cm, 6 small panels 23 x 16 cm, total dimensions variable
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