SKATING BACKWARDS

Learning to skate backwards is an extraordinary challenge for beginners. At first it feels all mixed up; a strange and almost blinded posture giving in to gravity and momentum. Eventually, after surrendering one's mental image of how this might work, the body takes over and a completely different thing happens. Skating backwards becomes a driving force without reason but most importantly a very magical achievement.

Drawing is like skating backwards: it's basic, essential and mysterious. In these new works my method continues to be entirely intuitive and improvised. It's manual labor every step of the way. Collage is by definition flexible. It is also like handling explosives. The work may appear strikingly frugal but it's more likely motivated by a jam-packed sense of humanity. My sources or associations are primarily domestic and rural: my children playing with toys on the beach or a splendid picnic table or a glimpse of some curious movement in the garden.

This new work straddles the line between the abstract and the abstracted. Externalized but nameless, like peeking through a keyhole. These works show very few signs of struggle and on first glance they might appear preordained. But in reality they are the remains of what passed the test; they wrestled me to the ground on a number of occasions. I spent so much time looking for an indisputable totality. Instead I unearthed elusive traces: purged, basic and necessary. It's impossible not to mention those Braque and Picasso collages from around 1914. Boiled down and extracted from the everyday these works pierced a fiction by celebrating the limitless possibilities of fragments. These two artists shoved the monumental out the door and gave the disembodied a new stature.

I'm also indebted to the work of two European masters William Scott and Raoul De Keyser. Their paintings and drawings are defined by tension because the laws of nature are humbly acknowledged at all times; a pleasing randomness is always coupled with a tough-minded determination to pin everything securely in place.

In the last two years I've shifted gears again; it's been a prolonged search. But I always defer to my own subjectivity when my observations demand grounding. Ideas can only take you so far. Ultimately only the object, by itself and alone in the world, carries the meaning.

George Negroponte, December 2009

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