Contemporary Paintings

These works do not depict the world. They indict it.

In my contemporary practice, the painted surface operates as what Tiqqun would recognise as a zone of opacity - a refusal of the administered visibility that late capitalism demands of both bodies and images. The figures that populate my canvases are not characters. They are symptom-formations: eruptions of the repressed social unconscious through the thin membrane of the representational. The monster is not metaphor. The monster is the truth of the street, stripped of its habitual ideological costuming.

I paint from within what Bruno Astarian, in his theorisation of grève sauvage and the communising tendency, might recognise as the moment of rupture - the point at which human activity refuses its own valorisation and asserts, nakedly, its irreducible strangeness. My figures do not labour. They haunt.

Roland Barthes wrote of the punctum - the detail that wounds. In my work, the entire canvas is punctum. There is no studium, no safe zone of academic reading from which the viewer may observe without being touched. The painting reaches out. It touches back.

Paint is my refusal. The canvas is the commune.