Graham Gillmore
03 Jun - 01 Jul 2006
GRAHAM GILLMORE
"I Hate To Talk Even To People I Know"
Gillmore’s second show at the OMR Gallery in three years presents a series of pieces that repeat his strategies in a kind of schizophrenic practice which transforms his work into a machine that functions as a plane of appropriations, where the act of recording appears to navigate between memory (self-awareness) and the impersonality of the pictorial act, but always based on a constant lack of differentiation between layers, between words, or between the finished product and the process.
Gillmore’s work since the 1990s has consisted of a series of surface operations, in which text and painting intersect in continuous transmutations from one stratum to the next, articulating paradoxes or absurdities that are encapsulated and superimposed, or presented in an anagrammatic dis-order.
The anagram can be read textually, but it also involves series of concrete blocks in cross section: text, paper and paint interlocking with each other and with other works in a kind of continuous reading.
The displacements between strata are literal. They are literal between the text and itself, in a deliberate metathesis of words; in the figuration of the written text (Boo Fucking Hoo, 2005), in the incessant construction of palimpsests, anagrams, words indented into the masonite, plastered over with layers of color, and words that have been painted over again or encapsulated in bladders of color, which are at the same time like speech balloons where the words exit, enter, disappear and reappear in another section of the canvas. They are all machines—cutting themselves out and unfolding themselves within one another—in which semantics ceases to be important for the same reason that one letter is transformed into a pictorial block (phallus) while also communicating between texts, between words, and between layers of paint and paper: they cut, they are cut, they fornicate, communicate and disappear.
As a repetition of the same strategy, Gillmore’s production launches itself into infinity, where his individual pieces are not important in and of themselves, but rather as one single recording surface, traversed not by something ineffable—that one thing that is missing in our Oedipalized culture—but rather by affections and the world that exists behind, before and on either side of a single surface: Gillmore.
"I Hate To Talk Even To People I Know"
Gillmore’s second show at the OMR Gallery in three years presents a series of pieces that repeat his strategies in a kind of schizophrenic practice which transforms his work into a machine that functions as a plane of appropriations, where the act of recording appears to navigate between memory (self-awareness) and the impersonality of the pictorial act, but always based on a constant lack of differentiation between layers, between words, or between the finished product and the process.
Gillmore’s work since the 1990s has consisted of a series of surface operations, in which text and painting intersect in continuous transmutations from one stratum to the next, articulating paradoxes or absurdities that are encapsulated and superimposed, or presented in an anagrammatic dis-order.
The anagram can be read textually, but it also involves series of concrete blocks in cross section: text, paper and paint interlocking with each other and with other works in a kind of continuous reading.
The displacements between strata are literal. They are literal between the text and itself, in a deliberate metathesis of words; in the figuration of the written text (Boo Fucking Hoo, 2005), in the incessant construction of palimpsests, anagrams, words indented into the masonite, plastered over with layers of color, and words that have been painted over again or encapsulated in bladders of color, which are at the same time like speech balloons where the words exit, enter, disappear and reappear in another section of the canvas. They are all machines—cutting themselves out and unfolding themselves within one another—in which semantics ceases to be important for the same reason that one letter is transformed into a pictorial block (phallus) while also communicating between texts, between words, and between layers of paint and paper: they cut, they are cut, they fornicate, communicate and disappear.
As a repetition of the same strategy, Gillmore’s production launches itself into infinity, where his individual pieces are not important in and of themselves, but rather as one single recording surface, traversed not by something ineffable—that one thing that is missing in our Oedipalized culture—but rather by affections and the world that exists behind, before and on either side of a single surface: Gillmore.