The Abstract Sculpture Paintings are works that I am continuing to explore in as wide a fashion as possible.  These works are sculptures by virtue of their qualities as thought-objects – they assert abstraction as a form of presence that resists an easy categorization or summation in language or in thought. Many abstract paintings are sculptural in this sense, for me. Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520-2) would be an ultimate example. The body of Christ becomes thing-like. Philip Guston is certainly a hero for me; I want to approach a level of thingliness that I find so compelling about his work (that Mark Leckey so beautifully describes in his video, Cinema in the Round, 2006-8). Things resist easy conceptualization. That’s why I will always love things or thingliness, if one can say such a thing.

Several forms of abstraction battle it out, so to speak, in these pictures: the sort of white cube, the “pure” geometric forms (the circles and the rectilinear forms that include the dimensions of the canvas), and the hybrid object sculpture that is certainly present, and yet cut through by the compositional techniques that hold everything together. Most of my recent works are meant to challenge the manner in which abstraction and representation are commonly considered to be essentially different.

I enjoy the thought that we, as beings, simply borrow and use a body, our bodies, and that this status of affairs best captures the essence of all the things of existence (including existence itself). ‘To be’ means to borrow and maybe even use something for a while. Then onto the next thing.