Featured paintings by Joe Hayes

My general starting points are influenced by certain material and immaterial elements such as Renaissance Grisaille, Ancient Roman Sarcophagus, Classical drawings, European late modernism, German radical painting, shadow forms and concepts of the shadow self, New York punk and musical Nocturns.

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These elements are then distorted and combined creating my own arrangements, scenarios, and settings, using various material processes and automated gestures to create an internal structure, achieving a dynamic of subtle modulations of space and form upon and within the surface of which dictates where the painting will go. Although offering flashes of concrete form, this sub-structure does not define the end result, but is instead used as a starting point for further investigation of which intuition, errors and resolutions combine to create a unified space of wildly different perspectives and protean forms.

 

To this end, I exploit the heterogeneous qualities of graphite and raw pigments, merging and redefining a process of drawing as painting and painting as drawing, separating the tools of each from the medium applied; through sanding, scraping and applying varnishes in a constantly considered yet improvisational manner.

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Forms are painted in and then painted or washed out beginning and ending and beginning again as new form appears. Creating a constant play between the tangible and the spectral. The surface variants achieved can be seemingly endless, creating weight and spatial ambiguities that open up a fusion of the pictorial and actual. This setting creates a particular modality of space where upon form, picture and support are born out of themselves. Thus producing something that is its own creation, evolving as the body and light move around the picture plane the viewer is faced with certain dilemmas of delineation.