Press Release

To open its 2005-2006 season, Galerie Pitch has chosen to present Mick Finch's recent paintings. Regular visitors to the gallery will have had a foretaste of this work in the context of a group show, Ce que porte la peinture, selected by Tristan Trémeau in 2003.
Two series of acrylics will be shown here; three pairs of large format works and around six medium formats.
Central to Mick Finch's work is an exploration of the image or icon and what lies within and around it; its status, its historical treatment and evolution as well as its relationship to painting. Re-examining pop art, minimalism and abstraction, his work raises questions about the cultural hegemony of the icon.
Mick Finch's paintings provide a field for these icons to operate within. In this show at Galerie Pitch, the larger formats work in pairs. One picture made up of black shapes on a white ground acts like a lexicon - a repertoire of iconic sihouettes or signs, like a sheet of transfers. Between each shape there is no relationship of scale or meaning. These are icons emptied of their history, graphic permutations of forms eaten into by their thin negative outlines made up of the dark colour of the ground zero of the painting. The other picture in this pair in broken primary colours plus black, is the product of a manipulation. As it is made, the painting is tilted in successive directions as shown by the drips that screen the motifs and interfere with their reading like disconnected networks.
The picture offers recorded evidence of the process of its making and this is the key to reading it, as a representation of both the time and the mental space involved in its production. Curiously, the ultra-thin sucessive layerings or screenings give an illusion of flat-bed painting. Images are literally embedded and the reading of the picture is like that of a book laid flat on a table. Yet another relationship to the image is thus evoked.