Invitation to an Opening, by way of an Introduction to The Separation Project [1998]

The days deepen, numerically increasing, days that demand to be expressed in fractions, parts and parts of parts, experienced in anxious-waiting, butterfly-life sequentiality, in which to feel unloved. And, because it is also that, the lust grows.The days increase and the lust, although not a negative, but a force of nature, ingrows. Involuntarily, it darkens its design, assumes rigours, tattoos itself in black-green images, in blue-red shades, in overlay, over the parts and parts of parts of days; like a biology, it assumes a continuity with life. You can pass time here. It is an architectonic force, not a pressure or a frustration but a paranoia and an effort to feel unloved for this reason: it builds. And it involves.

You can pass time, de-pressurised, here, as in a building. And passing from one corridor, should you receive an invitation, a psychic, silent, paranoiac, emanatory invitation, to enter in here, one day to the next, as in an erotic gallery, you will see the masterpieces and the doodles of an involuted, labyrinthine, yet practical eroticism.

To compose an invitation, to compose an invitation to an opening here, is a difficult task. The hanging is not complete, will not be complete (since it simply does not keep pace with the accumulation of new works), until a gap appears, in the fractions of days, and a firm date is set. It is all, of course, a movable feast. Its delights, abstract yet accessible, require patience and a small degree of discomfort or duress; that is, to transcend pure conceptuality, to become potential.

You shan’t read the instructions in my face or gesture, neither should you try and understand from my words, nor tone, nor inflection, what’s going on: these are all too readily misinterpreted. The effort of cataloguing, the sheer archival workload required in maintaining this private collection, gives me a somewhat grim demeanour, neither to be construed as an antipathetic grimness, nor an anomie, which should not be reflected in your appreciation. At least, that’s what I should say in an invitation to a viewing.

These conceptual pieces, although structured around certain obvious, repetitive themes, demand from any would-be visitor the ability, indeed, the desire to stand outside herself, to see past the mechanical representation of biologies in rest and motion. One should not be put off by a certain pervasive darkness, or grimness, that one feels, rightly, emanates from the artist (who is, in this case, a protagonist, conceptual, need one say?). The initial reaction may one of revulsion and the first impression may also be surprise at the surface banality here exhibited. However, every grim or dark banality is only the assumed response to an accepted vice.

An ‘open mind’ is not required here. Rather, it is the claustral which the artist-protagonist evokes, in his rigorous renditions, his expressions of autism, constituting a world he would invite the onlooker to enter, in a spirit neither of shock, revulsion, nor resentment, nor surprise, but as a fellow in crime, a partner in potential, a second-guesser, a joint advocate and, yes, an onlooker, a witness, in complicity, if only simply to break the spell, the trance of this close world, done in greens and blacks, light blues, dark blues and reds; or, so it appears, to this curator, to this critic.