In the 'English Patient', by Michael Ondaatje, the author informs us that the desert is not only a terrain to navigate our way rapidly through, or over, but exposes the notion of the desert as a much richer stratified space; the desert as physical and metaphysical experience in which death and transcience pervade a landscape 'particular' in its nature, a composition of crystalline grains and granular propellants in a constant state of flux and motion.
Exploring and traversing this notion the 'Black Desert' series of paintings embrace an act of perception and participation which attempt to acknowledge that meaning is prone to slip in and out of the grasp of rational and analytical language; an arena where meaning and the 'reading' of the image is constantly on the move, just like the desert' dissolving and drifting.
The blackening of the valley's desert floor by Ondaatje's Bedouin tribesmen and shamen to expediate inclement weather, the life-blood of the desert, is a potent image and becomes a painterly metaphor for the act of staining canvas.
This may seem an oblique source, but it is poignant and significant to the artist; an influential and powerful incantation for the paintings. But this is no North African desert, their now geographically distant origins reside in a solitude and intensity of experience of huge expanses of burnt, charred, scalded and blistered Australian desert and where a refugee, migrant spark can mean imminent destruction. The work is now more self-consciously separated from the explicitly tactile ferocity of that experience (as reflected in a collective body of images now known as 'Scattering of Dust').
The paintings now become more meditative and contemplative as the element of hindsight and retrospectiveness focuses and educates the mind and imagination.
The modernist notion of a reductivist sublime is unleashed in these works. They take up the ideologies of the occidental monochromists and adhere in no uncertain terms to Reinhardt, Newman and Klein's belief in the 'anthropomorphism' of scale and experience of the act of painting.
The reoccuring 'image' buried in the work whilst hinged to the notion of an internalised space, false X-Ray or magnetic resonance image is also depicted in the alchemical quarternity of colours, Heraclitus defined these as; melanosis - blackening, leukosis - whitening, xanthosis - yellowing and iosis - reddening. This interred human, sectional corpus is physical and spiritual but its perfections are flawed, cracked, maimed, bruised and blistered - a blueprint for some traumatic molecular motion - strange deep sea organism, airbourne spark or U.F.O.
This informs us on another level, is this now the spoils of a fire, a spark, the vital strike.
Transformation is pivotal to alchemical practice and thought and these images are deliberately allusive, shifting in and out of our understanding. As Gaston Bachelard states in 'The Psychoanalysis of Fire', "This is the very problem of the creative life, how to have a future while not forgetting the past? How to ensure that passion be made luminous without being cooled."
These are a selection of formative works from a continuing series.