Artists Statement

My practice studies the visual possibilities inherent in text, language, and the process of painting. I work with source texts ranging from scientific abstracts, literature and poetry, lists, numbers, codes, and my own cryptic notes. This text is always something that has resonated with me and warranted further investigation, but I prefer an oblique process that eschews directly referential content in favor of placing language on equal footing with the line, color, texture and space of the marked surface. By obscuring, erasing, and repeating the text I ensure that the painting is not merely read (which ends any engagement with it too quickly).

In order to emphasize language as material I often work on 3-D aluminum supports that project the painted surface into the space of the viewer. This is as much to alter how I approach the process of painting as it is to push the relationships between language and color fields into space. This allows me to expand the possibilities of the painting as a carrier of information; all of the sides cannot be viewed simultaneously, and the complete painting can only be assembled in the mind of the viewer.

Brian Dupont

December, 2019