I’m very pleased to be showing at the 256th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. My work ‘Thi’ has been included in the 1st Gallery, curated by Hughie O’Donoghue, which focuses on painterly sensibilities and processes. The work is a 200cm x 140cm collage of newspaper cuttings – specifically, edited images form the photographs that accompany the daily news stories.
Various gradients of dark tones, with occasional interruptions of found lines – a footballer’s shirt, strands of hair, a ballerina’s arm, smoke, lights – are re-assembled in a painterly language. The accumulation of the edited everyday images creates a dense and seemingly impenetrable surface, but with glimpses of recognisable pictures.
I re-authorise these found lines and textures as painting through extraction, dislocation and replacement. The works also play with notions of flatness and space in painting – the overall image seems to recede or move into the foreground; the marks are made from discernible objects as well as negative space; the blank, black parts of the composition also juxtapose flat surfaces and distant space, in and out of focus.
The Royal Academy Summer exhibition continues until Aug 18th https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2024
Simon Leahy-Clark 