Paul Merrick & Jane Millican
A Small Remembrance Of Something More Solid
36 GALLERY
36 Lime Street, Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne.
A show of paintings and of painting. A show of pictures of pictures.
Copying and sharing pictures is familiar enough to feel routine. Occasionally we might pause and wonder what we are doing for long enough to google “Plato’s Cave”, but the pictures will continue multiplying at breakneck speed. Works in this show were perhaps made within such moments of pause and wonder, and to invite those moments to be extended into a prolonged act of really looking.
These pictures revisit and translate photographs and paintings in order to pay attention to and explore the material actions of picturing – the fragile, fluid and haptic qualities of a surface alchemy, a particular sort of material activity that sits behind so many images. Like the forms they depict, pictures are only seemingly static – really looking can reveal their constant state of flux and becoming.
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Paul Merrick
National Geographic magazine images from the 1950s and 60s continue to pre-occupy Paul Merrick’s practice. Published at a time when the world was a larger place, this iconic magazine provided windows into hidden traditions, mysterious landscapes and beguiling portraits with its reportage and unique vintage palette.
These new paintings are meditations, each exploring a new focus, a balance between figuration and abstraction with thick paint contrasting against thin. Painted on aluminium the oil paint is worked and reworked either using an electric sander or by hand. The excavation of the surface is crucial to the process, revealing previous layers of paint to unveil a new image of forgotten places from another time.
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Jane Millican.
These works in pencil developed out of the pleasure derived from looking closely at the visual and material drama of painting, an ongoing curiosity around its actions and gestures as codes for individual expression and the tradition of connoisseurship that examines painted marks to establish attribution, authenticity, and value.
For these drawings, pictures remade and depicted within painted pictures were selected and isolated from online photographs. Already abstracted through remaking, consequently articulating actions and gestures more clearly than they describe their original subjects, these have been made again again. This slow act of drawing is direct and basic picture-making. The picture is both a copy and an original, and its subject, image, and authorship are multiplied and layered over time.
