‘Place: Abstract Painting’

PV: Friday 10th Feb 2023, 6pm – 9pm 

 

‘Place: Abstract Painting’ is a duo exhibition by Paul Cordwell and Rick Copsey. 

 

Rick Copsey's work developed from a Neo-Romantic metamodern approach (newly formulated by philosophers Vermeulen and Van den Akker) exploring oscillations between post-modern hyperreality and early modern romanticism.

 

The 'Paintscape' series investigate illusions and perceptions around the contested territories of landscape painting and digital photography. A hybrid digital painting/photography practice; oil paint on canvas is digitally macro photographed using multiple viewpoints and lighting conditions.

 

From these originating images, a small number are selected for their impact as apparent simulation of landscape/seascape and, by extension, to the romantic/sublime aesthetic associated with the historical development of photography (by painters such as Le Gray).

 

Paul Cordwell's paintings attempt to balance spectres of material presence with stubborn, obdurate material facts; to maintain a subtle discordancy between solidity and a form of visual slippage in which images are mutable and unreliable things.

 

They playfully compact Modernism’s various spatial gameplays with implied and real surfaces into odd painterly object-events. These are very much intended to acknowledge the impurity of painting as a comfortably static and definable practice; self-consciously structured with a belief that there has been an absorption of the feral temporal flow of digital media within the static staining and compressions of twentieth-century non-representational paintings implied spaces.

 

Both artists tend to use the square as a formal framing and editing device equally indebted to the organizational severities of Modernist reduction and the more contemporary formats of Polaroids and Instagram.

 

Both attempt to maintain the paradox of a medium’s specificity and its organic capacity to seep and bleed into other media.

 

‘Place: Abstract Painting’ continues to 11th March by appointment only on Saturdays from 12 to 4pm

 

Please contact Paul Cordwell for appointments as follows:

Email - paul.cordwell6@gmail.com

Tel - 07955 187386

 

Oceans Apart

24 – 26 King Street

Salford

Manchester

M3 7DG