David Dernie

Investigations of material, of the nature of perception and of the process of painting itself reveal the forms of everyday life to be strata of memory, vision and desire

There is never nobody even in the most deserted landscape, someone is always there to see it and compose it. These paintings are a reminder of that, foregrounding the texture of vision as well as what I’m almost tempted to call the colour of light.

Glimpses, textures, ambiguities construct a whole phenomenology of vision here. Sometimes the glimpses are of geographical features, like the rocky headland or promontory that recurs in a number of them; sometimes man-made objects like factory chimneys, or curtains, or windows: but their presence is uncertain.

The veil effect created by the earth-bound palette of browns and greens, ochres and grey-blues, and by the collaged strips of material is like a sense of layered light, shifting like clouds or the sea which is also glimpsed here and there.

Investigations of material, of the material world, of the nature of perception, and of the process of painting itself, they reveal the forms of everyday life to be strata of memory, vision, and desire. Moments of clarity sharpen the form but they don’t fix what it forms. The surface is all there is, including everything beneath it because that’s what it’s the surface of. That’s the nature of pigment, a product of its origins. Like us. The light shifts all the time, abstracted.

Now stand as an aspect of modern life to rove around visible but lost till dusk trails into flames that flutter and vanish into the waste of time, blood on the cut paper put to use by the work. Feed on clouds and echoes unset like a patient evening an austere wink among the nets developed and fixed as private as lives, loose ends scrabbled in the bush played out in posturing claims about home.

Right to land or left at sea. A heap of broken images in each version we all dream as raw film dreaming of the house, material from the first attitude like whims on the move. Torn in strips with the sea glimpsed through burned earth never to speak of it as a child might fear to see it there wrinkled and green yellow and bleached of light — it is the world it does not care to see us go into the streets like a sail. Where it rose is waste, a cloud of dark insects rising about the bank, the sound of new barbed wire.