Andrew Carr

With stringent contemporary elegance, Andrew Carr balances above with below in darkening and lightening spectrums of paint. The stratification of colour through the brushwork entails a feeling of self-containment: a painterly microcosm achieved on its own terms. 

Swathes of oil paint across wood panels or board canvases bring a tactile abstract effect, like the best of modern and contemporary abstraction – such as the paintings of Lee Krasner and Cecily Brown. Carr is markedly different from these two painters, because his work foregrounds evidence of a unique artistic process. There is something manifestly tectonic or geological about his works. Much like mineral time, Carr works very quickly (think volcanic or cliff-shelving rock formation) or slowly (the aeons of formative rock erosion by a river or a glacier). The painter can finish a work in one sitting or over many months: the logic is not imposed from the outside, but is what the artist feels to be right.

This way of depositing paint makes for paintings that on a subliminal level feel to be landscapes; the materials contoured like an environment shaped by its weather.