Six Pictorial Characteristics
Within the works examined here, six recurrent pictorial characteristics become especially clear in the mature paintings. They should not be understood as a consciously formulated programme or as principles deliberately applied by the artist. Rather, they are recurring qualities of a pictorial language that arises naturally in the act of painting itself.
1. Polyphony of Pictorial States
A single recognisable thing may exist within the same painting in several irreducible pictorial states at once. Colour may assert itself as surface, atmospheric volume or translucent depth; the same form may be palpably present in one passage while approaching dissolution in another.
These are not successive versions of the thing, nor alternatives between which the viewer must choose. Each retains its own pictorial character while remaining part of the same perceived whole.
2. Resonance between Surface and Depth
The painted surface retains its presence even as atmosphere, volume and depth emerge within it. Plane and depth remain distinct without cancelling one another.
A passage may affirm the material flatness of the painting while simultaneously opening into air or spatial recession. The vitality of pictorial space arises from this sustained coexistence: surface makes depth more perceptible, while depth renews awareness of surface.
3. Mutable Chromatic Identity
Colour is not fixed within a single spatial or optical condition. Its saturation, temperature, luminosity, density and surrounding relationships continually alter the character of its presence.
The same colour may assert the surface while simultaneously opening spatial depth. Its mutability does not dissolve its chromatic identity; rather, that identity becomes perceptible through the different pictorial states it is able to sustain.
4. Variable Optical Definition
The degree of visual definition remains mobile. Within the same recognisable form, passages of near-tactile clarity may coexist with others approaching atmospheric dissolution; edges may become firm, softened or partially absorbed into the surrounding space without ceasing to belong to the same thing.
Contour therefore becomes more than a boundary. It becomes a place of encounter between thing and space, where clarity and dissolution heighten one another.
5. Multiple Timbres of Painterly Articulation
Broad gesture and minute touch, density and lightness, opacity and transparency operate as differing timbres within a single pictorial language.
A brushstroke may hold form, light, temperature, movement and spatial position at once. Painterly articulation does not merely reproduce appearance; it allows several qualities of perception to remain simultaneously alive.
6. Mutual Disclosure of Pictorial Voices
Differing pictorial states do not merely coexist: they disclose one another.
Density makes transparency more palpable; transparency heightens the perception of density. Definition sharpens the experience of dissolution, while dissolution gives greater force to moments of clarity. Surface intensifies depth, and depth returns attention to surface.
These relations are not compromises or intermediate states: each retains its full pictorial force.
Unity therefore does not arise through the suppression of difference, but through its resonance. Each pictorial voice becomes more fully perceptible through the presence of the others.
Singulescence
Singulescence is not a seventh characteristic. The six characteristics describe recurrent qualities of the pictorial language; Singulescence names what becomes perceptible through their simultaneous presence and interaction.
Taken together, they show how mutability can coexist with wholeness, and how the irreducible particularity of the thing can become more fully manifest through difference without dissolution, mutability without loss, and plurality without fragmentation.
Affective Register
The complexity of these paintings does not culminate in intellectual display, formal virtuosity for its own sake or dramatic conflict.
Its affective consequence is more intimate. The tensions between differing states are not resolved by eliminating their differences; within the painting, they become an ensouled rhythm of living movement.
Here, “living” is not meant in a biological or mystical sense. It refers to a presence that cannot be exhausted by any single fixed appearance.
What is felt is not simply change, nor merely persistence through change, but a heightened proximity to the living particularity of things: each thing remains irreducibly itself while its presence continues to unfold through differing appearances.
The paintings thus bring mutability and particularity into the same experience. What changes does not become less itself; through the living multiplicity of its appearances, its presence becomes more deeply felt.
Research text, 2024