Press Release

This three day hanging of paintings from the Mick Finch Sublimey series serves as an introduction to his work A private view will be held at the gallery on Thursday 27th January 2005, 18h – 21h. A full exhibition at galerie Pitch is scheduled for November 2005.

Since his Closer Than You Think series of 1996 Mick Finch’s work has been concerned with the place of image in painting. In the new paintings from the Sublimey series what was to begin with a rhetorical preoccupation with abstraction has been applied to a wider historical and cultural context. Whereas Closer Than You Think related to a U.S. / European post-war relationship to painting, Sublimey focuses on rhetorical structures that have their roots in a European context. They emerge from the 18th century aesthetic backbone of Modernism which continues to function in a contemporary context. Here the Sublime and the Beautiful can be seen as end points in a wider rhetorical system . The philosopher Uvedale Price considered the picturesque to be the ideological counterbalance of the Sublime and the Beautiful. The spectator is challenged to compare what is being seen from a series of points of view and to work at an active reading of what is being observed. A contemporary application of this can be found in Yve-Alain Bois’ A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara, an essay which discusses parallax, the mechanism essential to the functioning of the picturesque, presented here in terms of the work of Richard Serra.

In the black and white Sublimey paintings images are layered and compressed into the shallow space of the picture plane using a series of painterly operations. The images are chosen for their transcendent and iconic qualities; the insidious sovereign, the skull of the momento mori, the AK47, the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. They have become signs , remote from their literal signification and their materiality. Drawn from the internet, schematised on the computer and then projected onto the canvas in a variety of ways , these images operate in a transfer between two extreme points - the aporia of the internet , and the immediacy of painting.
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Notes:

background on the Sublimey series:

Stations by Stephen Doré, Mick Finch & Olivier Gourvil,
L’Association Galerie d’ARTistes, Amilly , France, 2004,
http://mickfinch.chez.tiscali.fr/stations.html

Sublimey web page: http://mickfinch.chez.tiscali.fr/sublimey.html .

background on the Closer Than You Think series:

In the Image of Painting by Philip Armstrong, 'plus près que vous ne le croyiez',
Galerie Art & Patrimoine, Paris, 1998,
English version - http://www.mickfinch.com/in_the_image_eng.htm
French version - http://www.mickfinch.com/in_the_image_fr.htm

Critical Painting by Tristan Trémeau, 'closer than you think 2',
Galerie le Carré, Lille, 1998,
English version -http://www.mickfinch.com/critical_painting.htm
French version - http://www.mickfinch.com/critical_painting.htm

related material :

On the Picturesque by Uvedale Price, 1794 Essay on the Picturesque, 1796-8 and 1801, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/kjohnso1/price.html
A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara by Yve-Alain Bois, October: the first decade, 1976-1986 MIT
press,1987 (orginal French version Promenade pittoresque autour Clara-Clara, exhibition catalogue of the Richard Serra exhibition, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983).

related writings by Mick Finch:

The Night Shift, Mick Finch, Contemporary Magazine (N° 58), 2004, http://www.mickfinch.com/thenightshift.htm

Painting as Vigilance, Mick Finch, Contemporary Visual Art Magazine (N°15), 1997, http://www.mickfinch.com/painting_as_vigilance.htm

further information on Mick Finch :

www.mickfinch.com