Dave Lunt: August 2012

Tuesday 14 August 2012

'Relative Values'

I am currently exhibiting two small paintings in the latest 'Open' show at Art Lounge in New Mills. For info on the show (opening times in the evening etc..) and the venue please check out their facebook page at:

www.facebook.com/ArtLounge

Since March of this year I have also been working on a new drawing project, developing pencil and ink pieces which will hopefully be shown together at some point in the future. I have been in dialogue with a couple of galleries realting to this (working title 'The Cathedrals of Folly) so keep posted for any future developments. Until then here is a small sample of two of works in progress.

The Church of Misanthropy (detail)

The tragedy at St. Matthews point.

Artists Statement

My current
practice is centred mainly around painted and drawn formats, alongside
photography, digital composition and occasionally collected imagery from magazines,
websites etc…
The most
recent project I have been working on has focussed primarily on mark-making,
line and gesture. However these pieces have an intentional ambiguous narrative
that hints at (and makes reference to) a number of differing sources and
interests that I find ever fascinating.
From a
young age I have been excited by tales of exploration and old maps, this in
turn has become an adult obsession with sea charts, aerial photography,weather
forecasts and many aspects of geophysical phenomena (in particular theories
relating to the formation of supercontinents) and has grown from a juvenile
love of the ‘fantastic’ nature of such subjects, into a study of the abstract
qualities of cartography ( ideas relating to scale and distortion) and it’s
potential.
Making
reference to literary work by Borges, Baudrillard, Verne and Eco, amongst
others,my artwork is a development of these interests, with the outcome being a
number of hyper-real paintings and drawings, simulated again and again using a number
of different mediums to produce works with a duality that questions both the
idea of the ‘Real’ and the ‘Abstract’.
Starting
with a series of old macro photographs (taken from a long since destroyed
series of gestural abstract expressionist paintings) these images have been
digitally manipulated and worked upon to create compositions with a far more
infinite potential, each work being a direct response to the last. What are
left behind are images that no longer have any origin in the ‘real’ world but
instead exist only through the emergence of their own mythology, a journey
through an undiscovered seemingly dystopian landscapes.