Like the paintings you see before you, like anything we can ever see before us, each of our perspectives is themselves ‘Unfinished.’ From the diving board of observation, we jump through the air of experience, into the sea of myriad interpretations. As individuals, we have, and we are particular histories, and from these experiences, our potential instinctual reactions, the catalysts for interpretation, are formed and develop. These analytic faculties change as we do and undergo constant flux. Thus, not only do we have, in so many individuals, just as many potential interpretations, but these moments of experience and perception are always unique, and every new viewing even by the same individual provides a new interpretation. Each of the works on show, like any object of observation, is a gateway among gateways to this limitless field of awareness. The paintings go beyond this simple fact, not into the complex, but further into the simplicity of perception itself. As formalists in literary criticism established the universal base structure of fairy tales and myths, a tradition with its roots in the study of the shared characteristics of deities in various religions, he wishes to take us not only through the doors but down to the roots of perception. From this universalizing understanding of the bedrock of each of our unique interpretative capacities, he seeks to rebuild our knowledge of perception, liberating us once more from the shackles of tradition. In itself, of course, this is a tradition - that of ‘making it new’ once more.
As is instantly apparent to any of us entering this suitably equalizing gallery space, the paintings primary object of study is Color. Instead, through these studies, we are granted the chance to turn away from the complexities inherent in the pillars of understanding that dominate in Western art, and toward simplification, not in a regressive sense, rather one through which we can expand our perceptual capacities into the field of a ‘universality of understanding.’ Taking as their muses not the characters of myth or religion, but colors: Black, Yellow Red, and Blue, these paintings speak to us in a language that is before the spoken word, before the rationalist endeavor of ’making sense.’ Here, there are no facts, only an ever-growing collection of entirely subjective experiences, none of which devalue, all of which share the pedestal. Archetypes of perception, and not emotion, colors themselves are the true pillars of experience and interpretation. To sculpt color is to sculpt light, and therefore sculpting vision, perception itself. Through the windows of our eyes, these paintings act as convex mirrors; windows that are reflections, leading us back into our minds. The painter recognizes each of these works as unfinished, and what we assume through this is that though the present may flee from before our eyes, and out of our control, we still retain the ability to document this, our inability to command the faculties of our perception. Through their materials, the creator seeks to master their medium, only for it to evade their grasp and come to master them. This what is documented- the surprise of the creator at their lack of control, recalling Francis Bacon’s pretension for the mistake, the accident, the embrace and subsequent relaying of the state of flux. We have been offered a window to the Unfinished.
Text by Owen Brakspear