SAM LOCK

“These works are at essence grids, contiguous sheets of reclaimed bookpaper creating boundaries, borders, edges, walls at the point they meet. An ordering or measuring system, an authoritative presence that defines the surface of the paintings and the tone of their voice.

The edges and borders created here though are not impenetrable; on closer inspection they are an apparition; full of holes and gaps, a semiotic remnant of grid remains behind but it is not able to hold back or control.

There is also a fragile binary logic here, an opposition of system and thought.

Mapped across these grids are gestures, imperfect 1 inch wide brushmarks that cross or adhere to the grid they encounter, each mark mapping decisions and free will, to obey or override. These paintings are memories of the decisions that made them.

I have a preoccupation with old objects or material, not in a nostalgic way at all, but because they are bridges across time – they are both then and now – and full of journeys lost and past. There is a poignancy in the paper of old books, a hidden life - read by lost people, held by other people, an interface between humans and their thoughts, their imaginations.

Abstraction is the language of the hidden, the world within rather than without. It has a direct route to our ‘not-knowing’ and it is here that we are at our most honest and vulnerable. Here lies our tragedy; to have an intellect to find out what we are and why we are, but to never know the answer. We are ourselves at heart an unanswered question.

Imagination is not the stuff only of fiction, it is our reality; these works dialogue this. Binary opposites, dichotomies - they are certain uncertainties, presence and absence, definite mystery, answers and questions, confident vulnerability, physical and metaphysical, denoted connotations, known unknowns.”

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