| I’m currently working on a series of paintings that each feature a single face or head. I’m interested in how the painted portrait or, perhaps more accurately, how a painting that looks like a portrait, can be used to explore ideas of the uncanny and the (fear of the) loss of identity. The subjects in these paintings are not real people and they do not exist in any real space. They appear in isolation, suspended in a void; mute and separate from the world with their age, time period and sometimes even their gender, indefinable. |  |
Gary Colclough
I’m currently working on a series of paintings that each feature a single face or head. I’m interested in how the painted portrait or, perhaps more accurately, how a painting that looks like a portrait, can be used to explore ideas of the uncanny and the (fear of the) loss of identity.
The subjects in these paintings are not real people and they do not exist in any real space. They appear in isolation, suspended in a void; mute and separate from the world with their age, time period and sometimes even their gender, indefinable.
I’m interested in the possibility that, through depicting invented, constructed identities in which individual components are assimilated into an anonymous whole, there exists the potential to mirror a world in which identity cannot only be lost, but also swapped, assumed or reinvented.
The faces that I paint are composites made up of the fragments of different faces, which have their origins in photographic found material culled from magazines, second hand books and film stills. I combine these found images firstly as collages, combining images of two or more faces that are manipulated and aligned to create new possibilities that are both familiar and unknowable. By transposing these collages into paint, I attempt to unify the image so that it becomes something created rather than a configuration of pre-existing components.
I want the image of the face to function as a whole while still revealing how it has been constructed, so that evidence of the process is right there on the surface. I like the idea that, by leaving a trace of my workings, the paintings can appear as false as they do believable.
These paintings are all larger than life-size; in some, the face is enlarged to monstrous proportions. It’s important that they have the capacity to both allure and to repel. I’m particularly interested in their potential to allude to both the realisation and aberration of desired ideals.
