Heywood & Condie will present their Analog Paint Pour Summer in a group show New English Landscapes at Wood Street Galleries. This series of Floral Portraits draws on the rich tradition of both landscape scenic portraiture and the 'floral still life'.
This is in a landscape that has been deconstructed into its colour components, apportioned to quantities of the corresponding paint, then poured live in a performance, captured on video offering a contemporary dynamic twist on the most traditional of subject matter, a video work about the materiality of paint, abstraction versus figuration, and the relationship of man to nature.
Whilst providing the immediate experience of the materiality of paint, albeit in flowing form, these video works also have a specific figurative subject matter. Each pour is the abstract representation of a specific floral bloom; in this respect aspects of traditional floral portraiture captured in the 'botanical still life' have been upturned. In a studio based performance, the artists synchronistically pour the paint at either side of a canvas creating moments of tension as the individual paint pours collide, subject to chance and process, elements which are both integral to the work, and are reflective of the temporality of nature.
The flower has now been reduced to an 'experience' of pure colour, reduced to flowing paint on a vertical surface. Formally these works reference a 1950s abstract colourfield painting, but as moving images they introduce a sense of narrative, something the abstract expressionists avoided.
