Shadow Painting No.3, 2017

Source image, Digital photograph on vinyl on aluminium panels.

The underlying photographic image in some sections of the painting illustrated above is partly obliterated with paint pushing it back to become a barely visible image beneath the surface. These hidden images appear like latent photographic images, awaiting development. They are yet-to-be-completed images, such that the work has an implication of continuous re-invention and transformation. In this way the painting not only bleeds into the surrounding space, but into the future of itself. Cut and re-framed from a larger image these ‘latent’ ghost images become partly complete in themselves, but not fully realised. They become ‘idea/images’, caught in the process of disappearing or appearing. In their making they perhaps carry out both of these processes simultaneously.

A latent image implies an outside of the frame both physically and temporally. It is becoming something which is not within the frame, and as it is yet to be realised, lies in the future. More of the life of the image sits outside itself than inside, and yet completely dependent and interacting with it. Perhaps this accounts for some of the depth and potency of painting despite its flatness and thinness. This relationship between actual and virtual worlds is succinctly put by Merleau-Ponty, “… the visible is pregnant with the invisible …” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p216).

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Detail Shadow Painting No. 3