PAUL DESBOROUGH | WRIST ACTION : MARKING TIME IN STRETCH MARKS, PAINT AND PLUNDER

PAUL DESBOROUGH | WRIST ACTION : MARKING TIME IN STRETCH MARKS, PAINT AND PLUNDER

Room 1

Paul Desborough

WRIST ACTION : MARKING TIME IN STRETCH MARKS, PAINT AND PLUNDER

EXHIBITION /
JANUARY 12 TO FEBRUARY 25, 2006

Sidestepping the endless debate about the status and role of painting, Paul Desborough charts a course as rigorous as it is innovative. In response to those modernist theories that labour to purify, and in so doing, reduce the possibilities of a picture he seeks to expand them.

At the heart of these efforts to enlarge is a technique wherein he paints imagery lifted from shopping bags (the reproduction of a Rubens on the bag from an exhibition boutique, for example) onto plastic surfaces and then detaches the thin skin of paint. The freed surfaces may be laid over chairs and tables, parodying the decorative function, or attached to the wall without the supporting canvas or stretcher in an admirable inversion of the traditional gallery display. The images blazoned on the skins fold and distort, heightening one's awareness of their twice (or more) mediated “content.”

Such “formless” paintings might suggest limpness, upending the received critical wisdom of painting's machismo, or perceived otherwise, may seem soft - suggesting linens or blankets, particularly when draped over furniture - but however the eye encounters them it is the irreducible and autonomous fact of paint that holds the attention, its grain, colour, texture and its repeated figurative languages of landscape, still life and portrait. It is an uncanny presentation - ripped from its normal and normative contexts - and one that paradoxically underlines the materiality, and the simultaneous immateriality, of painting and its demands on the representational. And that is a significant expansion.

Desborough's is in this regard a unique pictorial world. From his skinning of painting, the removal of its anchorages - the literal and the figurative - he has made his work vast, mobile and aleatory. If he has skinned it, he has also left it more raw, and more alive.

Text by Peter Dubé

Scottish artist Paul Desborough practices an audacious and innovative kind of painting. In fact, paint as a material is at once his work and the ground of his work. On a formal level, the painting is usually made on the thin surface of a plastic bag from which it is subsequently removed by a technique one might call “scaling.” As for the subject matter of his painting, it explores the historic genres of still life, portrait and landscape.

Paul Desborough holds a MFA from Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, including at the Metro Gallery in Williamsburg, NY and the Neon Gallery, London, UK.

The artist has benefited from the Clark's residency programme.