Made using repetition as a process, the individual canvases of Untitled (FG) are not repeats. The original subject - a fabricated, gilt framed print of Goya’s ‘Still Life with Golden Bream’ - when transferred though repetition, is no longer the same.
The first canvas is painted as a direct response to the original subject whereas the second is painted from the first, essentially a painting of a painting. Categorised by the vagaries of likeness and seemingly diluted through repetition and appropriation, differences emerge, and the individual reasserts itself, underlining the unique qualities of existence and experience.
Within each painting the canvases exist in relation to each other, with all external subjectivity effectively abandoned. The image becomes an inevitable by-product of the painting, but it remains. The original subject, once translated into another painting, shows repetition making another thing. A new image is created, whose truth is only a work of fiction, defined by transient references to our ever-changing cultural contexts.
The paintings are simultaneously representational and abstract. They are objects and images, both similar and different.
And it is in celebration of such contradictions and paradoxes that the paintings exist.