The silence breathed
“I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show.”
Pablo Neruda, in Towards an Impure Poetry. 1966.
These paintings are about poetry, about music, about emotions and lost thoughts. Above all, they are about the process of making paintings as an offering, an invitation to contemplation, a glimpse into the inner world.
They are paintings that celebrate the process of their making. Layering line upon line, ravelling gestures made day after day, month after month until all that can be said, is. In the worked and scarred surfaces of the canvases, in a sense of urgency conveyed by a scratched line or of contemplation suggested through the tempered, blurred softness of paint, they track the process of coming into their own being.
It is a felt conversation of shared experience and knowing.
These paintings are about slow looking. These are paintings that reveal as they conceal. About buried layers, evident only at the edges, veiled text, words that disclose only uncertain thoughts.
These paintings address the unsayable. They are inarticulate, stuttering, inchoate. In a state of becoming. They swither.
Jenny Topfer. October 2016.