GD I feel that understanding and responding to the notion of ‘the gesture’ is crucial in reading your work:
The positive / negative aspect of your physical interaction on the canvas.
on the one hand create / on the other destroy
painting / unpainting
attainment of perfection / making it fucked up.
How do you see this process?
PL Gesture is an essential part of the work. The finger marks assault the canvas, corroding what is initially the monochrome, but the paint at times tries to repel the onslaught, sometimes in isolated incidents, other times a total counter attack, but the scars are always left, the gesture can never be truly erased.
GD The notion of presence through the finger marks is incredibly significant.
PL The finger marks work on a number of levels, primarily questioning the position of the artist to the artwork, but to some extent it is only a relationship in time of production. Once the painting enters into the realm of the public, an altogether different dialogue is created between the painting and the viewer. The viewer is confronted by a gesture. A paradox is created between the reader and the artist’s expression and their reaction to it, they slowly become aware that they can never truly decipher the notions of gesture within it.
GD The presence of the finger mark to me explicitly emphasises your authorship and it also serves to intensify the physicality of the painting, creating satisfying impasto to the point of the sculptural. Is there not a danger that this stylistic flourish of yours could become a decorative embellishment?
PL A Satisfying impasto! I hope not. There is definitely a decorative aspect to the work but what I have to avoid doing is going too far down that path. I do not want to abandon the conceptual approach for a visual narcissism - a balance has to be struck.
GD Does this imply a conscious move towards a reduction in your palette? The monochromes are really interesting, they play against the surface qualities.
PL Yes, I think I wanted to give myself limits; the earlier work contained too much information, a confusion of painterly languages. I wanted to reduce the language, removing aspects that were unnecessary and corrupting, yet still keeping the reading of the work as complex as possible, not allowing them to be pinned down too easily.
GD I’m interested in the process that you go through to make these paintings. There is the trial and error aspect towards the gesture and the need for layering paint on paint to achieve your surface qualities, but there is also the searching aspect as you work through your need to find your own voice within the (historical) principle of painting.
PL The production of the works has a number of levels, some I am obviously more aware of than others. But to answer your question more directly, the process contains elements both psychological and intellectual, a balancing game between spontaneity and control.
GD For me that is the key: a frozen spontaneity, they work as unique recordings of time within a painted language, developing there own visual histories and modes of communication.