Memory Club

This solo exhibition and catalogue summarises work made since 2003. The essay is a development of the thinking behind my practice, and is a detailed statement of new developments since both Bruce Fergusson’s text (Cat. Galerie Von Bartha 2001, ISBN 3-909287-22-0) and Sherman Sam/Rolf Bier’s texts (Cat Niederrheinischer Kunstverein, 2003, ISBN 3-924380-71-6).

The catalogue and group of works selected for the exhibition emphasise recent technical developments in the work which allow a more complex exploration of the ideas they are concerned with. Key to this is layering; alternations of transparent and semi-opaque encaustic or Perspex sheeting in assemblages where optica/spatial recession is often contradicted by physical protuberance. Self-conscious use of historical quotation (for example "variant" is a generic title take from the work of Joseph Albers) becomes part of a conceptual and visual game (JJ Charlesworth´s text calls it "3-dimensional chess"), whereby questions of authenticity (the death of the author, etc.) rub shoulders with issues of craft, sensual materiality and the status of the art object (see Gisbourne, Mark, "To see is to behold" in "Sight Mapping", Sala Rekalde/Bick,Gisbourne et al 2003).

This form of play amounts to a continuous suspension of any "end-game" for abstract painting. Like the notion of a palimpsest in the work of Raoul de Keyser (Bick gave a public lecture on his work for the Whitechapel exhibition of 2004) the process is one of endless partial erasure or obscuring and "re-writing".

• Organisation