Through visual sampling and painterly experimentation, my practice explores the tension and harmony created by the negotiation and occupation of space.
My work is marked by the detachment and displacement of objects, places or ideas. It captures a state of tension, the moment when one contextual relationship breaks down while metaphorical, formal and physical resonances suggest another. My vocabulary is informed as much by the history of painting as by my impulse to collect images and visual flotsam from my quotidian environment. Both feed the development of complex subjective spaces in which disparate elements are put together to form new relationships and narratives on the canvas and by extension in space.
Formal aspects of painting, and the constant questioning of “painting”, fuel my desire to create and further expand my vocabulary in search of a new openness in painting. With a strong focus on material and process, my painting practice is concerned with “painting as painting”, sampling images and visual cues from my surroundings, the Internet, and my own photographs to construct these negotiations of space on the canvas. By disrupting the rhythm of this visual continuity, the detached marks and displaced images become pseudo-landscapes and disconcerting scenarios. Discarded masking and preliminary under-drawings are just as crucial to the final composition as the more painterly and fully realized areas of the painting. Each juxtaposed element works together to form new relationships, extending the reading and vocabulary of the paintings.
As an extension of my ongoing painting practice, I have recently begun to explore issues of space through sculpture. The sculptural works question space, process and material as an extension from the canvas, often mimicking the flat shapes that inhabit the canvas, but in three dimensions. The cardboard constructions act as gestures, or sketches, themselves, of a possibility of space and/or form.
Though my paintings don’t necessarily hint at content, they are more concerned with the experience of looking at painting as painting. My pieces rely heavily on experiences, lived in, visited, and seen through images of my own or collected from other sources. This culmination and sampling of bits and pieces of memories help to bring together a composition that is both abstract and recognizable. These residual elements, painted in relation to one another and coupled with the evidence of process, leave the possibility of multiple readings quite open, with the goal of pushing the physical and metaphorical boundaries of representation and space.
Trevor Kiernander
15 Pendrell Road
SE4 2PB
London
London
United Kingdom
Europe
