15 x 20 cm | 5 x 7 in
Subject: Abstract
Original painting in pigmented traditional gesso on wood panel.
After selling out his MA exhibition (2021), Andrew has new work on show.
Pigments – eroding, sedimenting, tectonic – trace Andrew Szczech's paintings, in meandering, looping mosaics, or swathes like layers of water. The eye plunges into the contemplated object and drifts across its surface. Here the experience of looking is both sensuous and deconstructed: your gaze is reflected back at you. The colours of these works float between being organic and more painterly, occupying an amniotic zone. The aesthetic is historical in the same sense British artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures or electronic musician William Basinski’s seminal compositions are: as a poetry of dissolution.
Andrew is interested in the alteration of structures, both literal and social, that house the human body at this moment in time. The forces of breakdown are equalled by those of construction; those of dissolution by creation. There is an openness to his paintings: abstract, they allow for freedom in emotional response. Utopia is implicit: for the looker to question, not the artist to dictate. Using gesso to meticulously prime the canvas allows for paint to be activated and manifest the asymmetrical – though not disordered – forms patterning the works, making a living epidermis of the canvas.