Untitled (snow-white)
9 - 25 June 2011
Despite avoiding a closed title, there are multiple suggestions made by the sub-title of this exhibition, which form part of the internal logic that draws these works together. “Snow-white” is a reference to Gerhard Richter’s over-painted photographs, a series of works often annotated with two dates of recording, that of photographing and over-painting. Richter’s use of this title was I imagine intended to evoke the potential of the colour white and the different fictive and generative potential within both the material of paint and photographic images. A painting of a photograph will also always have multiple inscriptions of time, though this may not be directly noted beyond the trace left after a certain remove. And they may be almost entirely fictitious. Snow-white also recalls the idea of something that appears deathly, but is actually alive or retains a vitality, like a photograph may be at the very least awaken-able.
Most of all, the works chosen here could be said to function aesthetically like snow. That is, having a visual intensity, while acknowledging also the difficult of seeing and the near impossibility of holding. The paintings on aluminium have a level of visibility that is dependant on and changes within light: the aluminium surface both holds and reflects light, a dim but extensive sense of space, and the viewer’s reflection, each shifting as one moves across the image. And the material of paint both creates and withholds its subject. Within this push and pull effect, I hope the works regain a temporality, in the viewer’s present. When I work with photographs it is quite specifically to find something new, to open again an image of what has been, to what may be now.
Fiona Williams 2011