Andy Briggs NEW PAINTINGS | 4 April 2003 - 8 May 2003

Press Release

Andy Briggs' work centres around a process of overlaying areas of spray paint masked by stencils. Whilst retaining the semi-industrial nature of his earlier three-dimensional work, Briggs' paintings develop in unknown ways, as each layer of paint is added, allowing images to develop, piece by
piece. The iteration of the stencil marks mutate into something suggestive of microscopic photography or vast Landscapes. These entirely fictitious Images appear like the ghost of something strangely familiar, exposing our automatic reflex to rationalise abstraction and to see it as a representation of a known thing.

The complexity of the images (often the evidence of many more obscured marks can be traced underneath the surface) is belied by their resemblance to photographic prints. These are works that we immediately recognise as paintings, yet they seem to insist on a reprographic inception.

Briggs' work becomes a playful parody on the proliferation of photographs resembling abstract paintings, showing us how abstraction has become a model for photography, and then relocating it back into painting via the spray gun. The work is seductive as abstraction posing as reality, and as reality posing as abstraction.

gallery@jamescolman.com