Cleromancy I, Ink on 19th Century Paper, 2019

Ink on 19th Century Paper If painting, like any other language, can be considered an abstract system of signs, there must be a pictorial vocabulary and syntactical rules which communicate meaning, however subjectively. When individual expression and personal in(ter)vention subsume themselves under a principle of order, they derive a new lawfulness and new formal possibilities. His paintings are not necessarily abstractions but through figurative symbols and external references are amenable of multiple connotations, even when there may be a stated object. The ink on paper drawings featured here play on the talismanic power of language and the written word. Neither the provenance nor the purpose of the magical processes intimated by the drawings is stated: they could be at once apotropaic charms, the means of commanding supernatural forces or a baroque red herring. Arising from an examination of (predominantly) British prehistoric funerary monuments, his current paintings might be styled a form of anastylosis: an attempt to inflect fragments of mid-20th century painterly language with a 21st