Description

An oil painting on board, 59 x 91 cm, (23.3 x 35.8 inch), of a man threading a needle sits on an easel. The painting is spot-lit. As one looks on you see the man suddenly blink or gulp. He occasionally makes a desperate attempt to thread the needle. At various moments he hears the sound of a peacock, a passing train and a police siren, this makes him nervous, his body heaves with heavy breathing. The painting most of the time stays still. This effect is achieved by projecting a video of a man threading the needle on a painting of the man threading a needle.

Oil colours give the surface of the painting a palpability, a weight of an object where as the videoed image gives it the aura of light and we arrive at a kind of hyper image.

There are areas in the painting which are not videoed but only painted. I am able to absorb light in certain areas and reflect them in other, there are areas where light bounces back through layers of thin colour giving the effect of a stained glass window. ( the blacks are the deepest black because unlike in cinema and video projection the black areas are not made of ‘absence of light on a white surface’ but actually painted black giving me the greatest colour-graduation possibilities. I believe we could call it ‘sculpting with light’. Its also a way of extracting a notion of time out of painting and a notion of light out of film and making a third thing.