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With a shrug

of the shoulders

the mountain

came down.

There is a certain kind of futility attached to the artist statement when you make work like mine.  It suggests a level of intellectual authority or conceptual boundary on my paintings that is in some ways disingenuous. In truth, my work method is procedurally messy, historically contingent, and purposefully disorienting. I consider my paintings to be in a critical dialogue with the historical conventions of abstract painting, and it has been a consistent preoccupation for over two decades. And though it is tempting, and in some ways inevitable, to read my painting practice as a critique of historical models of self-expression such as gesture, it is my hope that the work remains slightly more puzzling and unexpected, and perhaps less fixed to any certain interpretative or critical position. As a result, I have become increasingly comfortable with a more fluid and open-ended discourse around the work.

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Over the past few years, I have become somewhat obsessed JMW Turner's extraordinary series of late paintings, in particular those that might actually be considered unfinished works. These paintings speak to multiple preoccupations in my own practice, ranging from theatricality, surface, diffusion and obfuscation, and a certain unsettling jitteriness, while remaining stylistically very different from my own work.  I am particularly interested in how a certain "staging" of spaces and history are churned through the materiality of paint and the accumulation of gesture into something that is both contingent and unfixed. My paintings hover between a kind of feigned authenticity commonly associated with abstract expressionism, and a very real desire to make meaningful, dynamic and open-ended experiences for the viewer.

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-John Kissick

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