Pierre Imhof

Leaving Suburbia

Urbs, Burbs…

Even though my painting changes constantly, with each exhibition representing a further step in an ongoing investigation, after “String,” my last London show, I felt the choice I faced was more than usually stark. Should I continue to develop my grids and lines, the layering that begins in chaos and works towards coherence and aesthetic pleasure or should I now attempt to abandon the familiar, set out without a map and move about my world of signs and paint without preconceived goals?

After nearly 20 solo shows in almost as many years, the tools of the trade become familiar. The solutions to old problems appear without too much searching, and a certain procedure is in place to deal with the minor “accidents”. A so-called mid-career artist can move comfortably towards a refined maturity with the assurance of a well-established following, whether dealers, collectors, or simply fans who have been following the journey since long ago.

In “Leaving Suburbia” I set out on a number of short journeys, away from the well-known territories and into a new urban environment, without a familiar grid, where the planning regulations are different and the zoning is otherwise defined, where the situations encountered are new and the rules are rewritten. One element in this deliberate change of terrain was to stop using the acrylic paint which had served me for the last 15 years as the predominant medium that unified all others, and to start using oils again. Another was to re-introduce colour as a foreground element, releasing it from the muted existence it had been restricted to in the ground and intermediate layers.

The earlier grids which in “String’” had collapsed into a packed multitude of lines burdening the picture plane now have an afterlife in squares that float or hover, uprooted and disaggregated, yet at the same time struggle – or gravitate – towards a new order, a new structure. The vertical lines are still there, some still drawn in crayon, some still made by paint running down the canvas, but there are new lines, too, that wind like the meandering traces of a flâneur lost in the city, marvelling at the unknown while trying to get his bearings. White, so long the unifying safety net, is still present, of course, but now it is dirty and bruised. The pure white fill in some of the floating squares acquires new significance in its tension with the lived-in off-whites and pale tones in the background. Yet the edges around these pristine fields don’t quite meet, like picture frames broken or simply falling apart from lack of care.

For the first time in a long while I spent days and weeks working on pictures while not having the faintest idea of what they would finally look like, or whether indeed they would ever come together and work at all. The doubt and frustration can at times, I think, be clearly seen in some of the works, while the joy of a long walk of discovery will I hope be palpable in most of them. To leave the comfort zone, the well-trodden path, and to lose oneself without a map: this is one of the great pleasures of the big city, and it is the starting point for the show. The paintings are the traces of what happened then.

Pierre Imhof October 2005

Pierre Imhof Home Page

VIEW THE

ONLINE

CATALOGUE