Abbreviated Gestures | Simon Degroot
5 - 23 September, 2023
In these works, I am interested in amplifying hand-drawn gestural marks and minor details. Like tending to a garden or keeping a visual journal, the paintings are a space for thinking. Each mark operates as both a reference to the tactile movements of a finger across a touch screen as well as to the history of gestural abstraction.
The colourful touches are like an enlarged dissemblant tending, which is simultaneously automatic and considered. The painted monochrome foliage supports these gestures while also suggesting that this cropped image is only a fragment of something much larger and ongoing in my practice. Imagery of fast-growing rhizomatic plants, which are often used in spaces for domestic screening, alludes to our combined search for a private locus amoenus, a ‘pleasant place’.
When resemblance meets the abstract in this shallow pictorial space there is a conflation of marks and a layering of interactions. This body of work captures sectioned moments of abbreviated gestures. — Simon Degroot, 2023
