Painting 2025 are works that treat paint not as a neutral vehicle for image-making but as the primary subject of inquiry. The surfaces are built through successive strata – opaque blocks, veils of thinner colour, abrasions and reapplications – so that each layer records a temporal decision. The paintings therefore function as palimpsests: what is visible is only the latest moment in an ongoing negotiation between covering and revealing, control and contingency. Edges soften or harden depending on how one layer meets another, and the drag of the brush leaves a physical trace of pressure, speed and hesitation. In this way, the material behaviour of paint – its viscosity, absorption, and resistance – actively shapes the final composition.
Layering also produces a spatial ambiguity. Planar geometric forms appear stable, yet they are destabilised by the knowledge that they sit upon and are partially permeated by earlier chromatic events. Colour fields are not singular; they are accumulations, sedimented through time, carrying residual warmth or coolness from what lies beneath. The horizon-like divisions and architectural blocks become less about depicting place and more about testing how depth can be generated through sheer material accretion rather than illusionistic perspective.
Conceptually, the works position painting as a process of continuous revision. Each layer both asserts itself and partially erases the previous one, creating a tension between permanence and transience. The viewer encounters a surface that oscillates between construction and dissolution: forms seem resolved, yet the evidence of reworking keeps them provisional. This approach foregrounds painting as an event unfolding over time – an embodied record of looking, covering, adjusting and re-seeing – where meaning arises from the cumulative history embedded in the paint itself.
morgan veness 