Tristian Koenig is delighted to present a solo exhibition by London-based, New Zealand-born Selina Foote, our final exhibition for 2013. Due to the artist's travel constraits, there will be no opening reception for this exhibition.

In light of this, we've decided to publish a brief text by the artist in this exhibition announcement, which broadly outlines the formal and conceptual territory of the present body of work.

Each of these paintings begins with a drawing that is developed through a process of gleaning information from a reproduction image of a historical painting. This process of drawing from a reproduction of a painting rather than from the original object identifies the reproduction as a thing in itself. It has its own size and scale, its own palette, surface and texture and perhaps most importantly the framed object is reduced to two-dimensions. While being a stand in for the absent original, the reproduction replaces it. Both the reproduction and the drawing produced as a response take on the role of a material, a tool for the painting process. Because the source painting has been mediated by photography, and is exists now as a reproduction, it must undertake a process of becoming a painting, while already representing one. It must become, once again, as Foucault termed it, a ‘picture-object.’

Areas of light, shadows, line and colours that appear in the source painting start to inform a new image extracted from the original. In this sense the source image becomes a trigger to commence the painting process. It solves the problems of composition by setting and defining the probabilities of the canvas. The canvas is no longer blank, what goes where has already been decided before a mark has been made, because of this the painting as it is formed has something to work against, a struggle takes place. The function of the image after it has fulfilled this role of directing paint ceases. It can then be removed almost without a trace.

As the paintings pull away from the representational imagery, which informed their making, they start to become things in themselves - not simply pictures in their own right but objects as well. Through revealing the edge, the stretcher, the ground and even the wall they acknowledge their own objecthood. Particularly on such a small scale, these paintings identify themselves as an object and not only as a picture.

he source image serves its function in setting up the composition; it provides a penetration of the canvas. The canvas then is no longer a site of infinite painterly possibilities. Instead the painted reproduction has established a series of pictorial givens, which can then produce an entirely different outcome to the original. As the image undergoes a negation through the painting process the resulting image may appear entirely unlike its source.

“It is the beginning of the end that has been our history, namely what we are accustomed to name modernism. Indeed the whole enterprise of modernism, especially of abstract painting, which can be taken as its emblem, could not have functioned without an apocalyptic myth.”

This history that Yve-Alain Bois speaks of in 1986 is now our past. The apocalyptic myth sits within this past too. Consequently the question raises itself, how might abstract painting function without an apocalyptic myth? That is, if there is no end point, no final truth to be discovered or unveiled, how can abstract painting operate? The answer here could be in its own right or on its own terms. Rather than following a linear trajectory or single minded pursuit, the painting investigation can meander, satisfied by individual solutions to painterly problems. Each painting will achieve satisfaction in and of itself rather than for a greater agenda, and in particular rather than toward a final gesture.
From this position and with this approach in mind it is possible to put aside the essentialism of pure abstraction. Palettes can extend beyond the purity of black and white, or red, yellow and blue. Compositions and forms can suggest space or figuration, a trace of the representational can weave its way back into the abstract language. Also, these abstractions can make room for the presence of the artist. Flawed lines, subjective decisions, uncertainties and ambiguities can become part of the picture making process.

*image (left)
© Selina Foote
courtesy of the artist and Tristian Koenig