[everything becomes mysterious] | curated by_SOPHIE O’BRIEN

A fictive space, a complex legacy, a participatory field, a thing we collude in dreaming up, willingly suspending our disbelief.
[It exists not on a surface, but on a plane that is imagined…]

As the archetype of art,
[A painter doesn’t paint a quince, he paints all quinces],
it has re-invented itself and been re-invented by others innumerable times.
[Painting exceeds its frame.]

A production of signs different to other mediums, swimming in a historical sea.
[I paint because I am a country girl. Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint.]

The designator of market values and authenticity,
[The good son.]
its self-reflection creates a dissatisfaction with itself that propels it forward.
[In the good old days, painting was an art…]

It is distinctly conflicted.
[A constellation of problems.]
[Not Paradise.]

Re-mediatization – where the aspects of one medium are addressed by another – has kept it open and alive.
[It is a mirror, mirroring change.]

Overtly, it is no longer medium-specific.
[Painting is a philosophical enterprise that doesn’t always involve painting.]

The un-nameable meeting the structural, a ghost of presence manifested through the handwriting of the author. [The act and the eye.]

A face, a subjectivity, brings forth a monologue/dialogue with the viewing eye, holding concretely a private, imaginary space.
[A labyrinth of labyrinths.]

In honouring the alchemy of painting, we might paint or we might not.

[Dorothy Porter, Philip Guston, Marlene Dumas, Mark Leckey, Pliny the Elder, Theodor W. Adorno, Gerhard Richter, Isabelle Graw, Jorge Luis Borges and others].