The Abstract Sculpture Paintings are a new series of works that I would like to continue to explore in as wide a fashion as possible.  I view these works as 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. While Philip Guston is certainly a hero for me, I will not humiliate myself by trying to emulate his work, however, I do 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.

The sculpture sits on a plinth that is too small. It fills the pictorial space and yet the not-so-very-white-cube in which the form sits continually asserts itself through the traces of the geometrical construction that defines the space. Several forms of abstraction battle it out, so to speak, in this picture: the sort of white cube, the “pure” geometric forms (the circles and the square canvas), and the hybrid object sculpture that is certainly present, and yet cut through by the compositional techniques that hold everything together.

Perhaps at the bottom of all this, 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.