WAYNE GONZALES

Contemplative, evocative and mysterious, Gonzales’ work uses a rigorous formal structure to mine the processes of painting and perception. His process begins with digital images culled from random searches on the internet. In addition to this, he uses source photographs of places and people taken himself. Wayne often revisits the images he has taken and zooms in and out of the whole composition like a camera lens, cropping, moving and playing around so that the final work has a whole different meaning.

Dates and locations of the actual images are unimportant, but content and search phrases provide catalysts for further investigation. The artist edits the image into a form that can be executed in a restricted palette of one or two colours. The image may be visible from a distance, but upon closer inspection becomes lost in the very brushwork that defines its form: an experiential reality analogous to the difference between watching a crowd from a distance and being a participant in the action.

Although their genesis bears common ground with the photography-based cycles of the political paintings of Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, his paintings insist upon a shift in our perception of photographic truth. Painting here is exhausted by the infinite associative searches and links created by culture’s new short-term memory. By breaking down his source images and building them back up, Gonzales re-invests the canvas with a new relevance: history paintings for the digital age.