Stacks and Wrap-ups

The “Stacks and Wrap-ups” emerged out of a series of paintings I made of markets around the world, drawing on trips in Latin America, Europe and India. The catalyst for the paintings was an experience I had in the central market of the remote Argentinian town of San Juan. In one section of the market were a series of piled up stacks of market goods and paraphernalia that evoked a warehouse art installation of large-scale sculptures. The objects were immense, bound-up and mysterious. They evoked powerful forces of production and consumption, distribution and waste. To my eye, they radiated an aura of hidden power, as if they might explain something, if only I could get at what it was. I began to imagine a series of large canvases and to seek out other manifestations of such behind-the-scenes objects – objects that in their bulk and form exposed the processes of the markets, yet at the same time were like a shrine, with the goods/the gods absent, hidden, under wraps. The title of the series “Stacks and Wrap-ups” has resonances with art history – minimalism, Christo and Jeanne Claude’s wrapped objects. There are references to sculptural conventions, going back to Arte Povera, and encompassing assemblage processes and the concept of the found object. The paintings return these aesthetic manifestations to their sources in ordinary life. By giving attention to the context of the objects, the paintings set up a tension with painting’s inherent aestheticism. There are scraps of signs, labels, writing, images and sufficient indications of place and atmosphere to place them in a context of distribution and supply systems that are both highly localised and international.