Collaborative artists Biggs and Collings work reveals a deep understanding of modern and pre-modern art. They believe colour and form in painting can produce a structural space that is like observable reality. Instead of depicting recognizable objects they use color, pattern and repetition to create complex images they aim to be truthful about the sensation of seeing.
"Primary among our aims is changeability: you don’t see what you think you see. The grid and the color are employed to contrast predictable and unpredictable pattern. Bounded forms with close tones create a fusion of field and figure. Layered color and color that is striated light-and-dark are combined to create indeterminacy of surface. Scientific grid is countered by miasmic tone. We are interested in recording elisions, reflections, visual tricks and confusions, without framing them in a form that suggests propaganda or sentimentality.
Our paintings and graphics throw down the glove to what’s going on now. They are not nihilistic. They are not ironic. They can’t be read as an expression of dematerialised, postindustrial production. They start from a conceptual basis, two people from diverse fields turn over and look at lost knowledge, a lost interest – colour. It used to be part of what an artist knew. It doesn’t have to be anymore. Is that a by-productof alienation and atomisation, or the radical overturning of an exclusive field of knowledge? We think it’s the former. And our work, via a tortuously complex procedure of balancing and harmonizing, sets out the terms of this visual argument"