Painter based in London

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@henrymartyngibbs

https://www.instagram.com/henrymartyngibbs/?hl=en

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I think the act of queering and the embodiment of being different can be realised as an abstraction from the heteronormatively constructed society we live in. It’s an abstraction devised to multiplicate and complicate the standardised ideas of looking, gesturing, and depicting which have been structured to be a specific image of what’s ‘normal’; any slight deviation of looking/moving/being is remarked because of this constrained normality. The idea of seeing things in a different light, physically and metaphorically, avoids the visual consumption of the immediately recognisable bringing on the instinct to discover, like discovering a new space or person, or perhaps a queer identity and queer space. For me, it is important to rebuff the viewers’ impulses to recognise and categorise liberating them from blatant identification creating new visualisations, intimacies and perspectives.

The monochrome constructs and engages with this valued sensation and deepens the libidinous energy that undertones my work as a whole. To enhance this, the use of the old master technique, chiaroscuro creates contrast and depth as a build up from the darker surface layer. Perhaps reminiscent of a club night space or an underground environment where the highlighted bodies from luminescent, sporadic spotlighting, abstracts and monochromes the space. Here, as a place of transformation, the traditionality of the paint and its techniques are manipulated to articulate a modern, incandescent space, restaging the canvas surface as a queer artifice of the traditional forms.

Queerness has hence been visually abstracted to accommodate for a new aesthetic representation forging a visual diary of life beyond heteronormative existence. The use of colour can and has enhanced queer visualisation, specifically the monochromatic as a form of queer abstraction, to demonstrate a different life, a new depth of being, and therefore a new system of representation.

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Artwork information:

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Untitled, 90x90cm, oil on canvas

Untitled, 90x90cm, oil on canvas