Philip Lumai
Series & Singularity
There are new expressive possibilities for form and colour that promise to unfold the future of abstract painting. Rather than tackling the subject as a linear historical problematic, nor accepting the current situation of contemporary art as a generalised and rational position, I choose an idiosyncratic path that reflects on the forms and processes of individuation and gains distance from the socio-economic interpretations of identity and meaning, falsity and facticity by following the work's inherent inflections and finding its own singularities.
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I am working with seven distinct and on-going series of paintings. From its unique point of view each series pursues a progressive mutation and redevelopment of abstract painting's possible relationships to form. In this exhibition we have curated diverse works from four different series.
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Below is a short description of each work, for lack of space and a desire to leave the paintings fully open to the viewer, the possible metaphorical and corresponding associations as well as the more developed philosophical and critical reflections that inform my work are for the most part left for another time.
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for & after 'Unit' #2. 2024
Ink & gesso on Arches paper, early 20th century frame
This work on paper draws on the 'Unit' paintings that I have been making since 2018 and imagines new paintings yet to come. The ‘Unit’ initially refers to the rectangle itself, the painting’s fundamental format. I make this tangible and accentuate it by creasing the paper to physically inscribe an inner border. Abstract forms can now grow out from the limits of this 'unit' or in other words they are necessarily anchored to the 'unit'. They reach out and encounter the spacial tension of the white ground. The ‘Unit’ is also like a container that captures the possibility of form and the intensity of co-existence. By using the rectangle itself as an inherent system of approach it sets up a working process that actually promotes the imagination and gives rise to the painting’s possible directions. The space inside the unit is enlivened and itself runs outside and around the rectangle, simultaneously linking and separating the forms while traces and marks 'escape' and cross into this other territory. This reflection on the nature of the rectangle's border continues to modulate throughout the frame.
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'Strange Creatures' 7 & 8. 2022
oil & acrylic on paper & linen
‘Strange’, because they have to be strange in relation to the organised side of my mind and ‘creatures’ because they have to arrive and appear to me as something other. Rather than a reflexive type of painting that sets out to reflect on something else (even by means of self-examination), I am aiming instead at something more obvious than that - painting as a creative action; bringing about something that did not pre-exist in other terms.
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'Sketch for Polychrome Sculpture 9'. 2021
spray paint & oil on linen. 201 x 245 cm
This title works as a generative concept ie. the title puts into play a series of possibilities from which the painting will draw its singularity:
SKETCH - to think and search through in the process of painting, to draw out.
FOR - towards, speculatively.
POLYCHROME - unrestricted in colouration. Painted.
SCULPTURE - an undefined or abstract form or grouping of forms.
If we understand painting as a language of its own, we must also recognize the rare autonomy of its modulation as the very significance that we seek from it.
Philip Lumai
September 2024