Jonathan Hurry, Minerva

22 juni 2016

I am interested in the immediacy and mutability of the gesture within the domain of painting. Inscribed painterly gestures have, to me, a fascinating sense of closeness and richness — they can seem energetic or lethargic, anxious or aggressive, coherent or confused, and in so doing they stimulate an activating of my perceptual experience that I find ripe for exploration. Gestures can, for instance, seem viscerally bodily, vividly expressive, and wilfully intentional, coming across as either self-consistent or contradictory.

They can also manifest all the multitudinous properties of physical material, such as liquidity and solidity, transparency and opacity, fineness and thickness, and in doing so they sensitise me to the possibilities within material and my material relationship with it. On these bases I can set up combinations and clashes of the different ways I am poised to respond to gestures, through strategies such as cropping, layering, highlighting and blurring, and so hopefully achieve images that are deliberately provocative, challenging and questioning the ways I react to them, and illuminating my perceptual predicament.