ALAN GREEN

exhibition view Konstruktiv Tendens, 1989. photo Åke Sandström

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Two Angles Three Rectangles To Top, 1993, oil on canvas, 155 x 160 cm. photo Jon Riddy

From Prints to Paintings.

"The monoprints made between late 1999 and the end of 2000 proved to be a transitional step between the expansive "Horizontal" paintings exhibited in Tokyo and London between 1996 and 1998 and the "Disc" paintings of 2001. Access to a good intaglio workshop facilitated the production of a single monoprint image of the required precision. Flexibility existed for precise and rapid development within selected formal parameters. Instantaneous decisions, revisions and adjustments, impossible to achieve in any other two-dimensional medium, became the norm. This made possible the rapid exploration of a vast range of formal options realised only at the instant of printing.

The introduction of specific collage elements and masking stencils, worked in opposition to the sense of implied speed generated by the rolled surface and the scratched line. This confrontation between fixed and free has been a central preoccupation of mine since the "Block" paintings of 1972. The exposure of underlying layers through surface perforation, as in print I Nov 00, led directly to the "Disc" paintings of April 2001 onwards.The painting "Lattice" was the first painting to use the language developed in the prints. To facilitate this I attempted to transcribe the central image of print III Dec 00 onto a primed canvas - an increase on the linear scale by a factor of 10.

Central to the recent paintings has been the contiued use of the disc in both its male and female modes. The discs themselves physically exist in acetate and are strictly hand.made without geometric aids, thereby leaving more scope for the development and interaction of organic irregularities. Their location, density and scale varies in relation to their role on the canvas surface - e.g. as stabilising points of reference, free clusters of family groups or punctuated points exposing recessed layers of activity. Essentially hand-made, I intend that they reflect direct, tactile activity condensed to essentials to form an indivisible totality."

Alan Green
March 12 2002