Gabriel Phipps
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Statement


“The process of painting activates seeing. It is a need to see that drives me to paint; a compulsion to slow down, to observe the world around me, the interior worlds of imagination and memory, as well as whatever painting I have on hand. If one takes a protracted look at an everyday static object, a piece of masonry or metal, often that object will appear to shift under one’s gaze. The appearance of movement is evocative of an inner-life, a subatomic dance or micro-cosmos. Though the pacing is distinctly different, daylight dappled across a brick wall displays a kind of visual activity analogous to that exhibited by a television screen or video game.

Unexpected equivalences of this sort are manifest in my paintings. The geometric units that reverberate throughout the work are at once lighthearted and serious, flat and volumetric, solid and ephemeral, synthetic and organic, static and kinetic, fictitious and real; they are structures seen from above and from the ground; they are free-standing and verge on collapse; they speak of pink flesh and embody someone who is no one, someplace that is no place.

The duality of the paintings, their refusal to fit into a single reading, their very instability makes them more than the sum of their parts – it gives them vitality and a spark of life.”
All works © Gabriel Phipps