Exhibition

The first solo exhibition of British artist Guy Patton. A series of large-scale acrylic paintings that embrace spontaneity, process and collisions of colour through layers of paint on canvas.

Within this new body of work, Patton demonstrates a rigorous appreciation of paint as his medium. Manipulating his materials and transferring paint from one canvas to another with collisions of unlikely, unsettling and at times uncomfortable colour combinations; The use of colour setup to reveal a pleasure/displeasure contradiction.

The act of painting is a fundamental aspect of Patton's practice. Working on series of paintings simultaneously, the works inform one another and bear the imprints of this process; often without a preconceived vision or design. Deliberately and decisively transferred from one to another, acting as a means of printing, these imperfect repetitions enacted by memory form the notions of what Patton describes as a 'psychic space'.

One painting is needed for the next, however they have separate entities. The paintings are formed through ever-changing techniques and processes. Through decisive lines and shapes, varying in speed and gesture, tentative arrangements take shape on the canvas.

Deriving from a fascination of deconstructing influences in modernism and the impersonal aesthetics of hard-edge abstraction, the painting creates itself out of a nexus of chaotic and calculated movements through the use of line, pattern and colour. Patterns recur throughout, whether as repeated gestures or stencilled sequences that mirror the standardised patterns of minimalism. He chooses to challenge and deconstruct art-theoretical oppositions.