Rodney Graham: Painting Rocks

"The system we developed to achieve this depth, through airbrushing and spraypainting, was to take a fragment of a larger template that I created – if you look from one to the other you might see a simple shape recurring. This was then overlaid and spraypainted over with a kind of a shadow effect that evokes, I guess, in a graphic way, the techniques of Analytic Cubism."

Although best known for his conceptual practice as a photographer and installation artist, Graham, has often turned to painting, in the first instance for his 2007 exhibition, 'Wet on Wet: My Late Early Styles'. Then generated from examples of abstract artists including Francis Picabia or Jean Arp, he moved on to Morris Louis-style drip painting, then shaped canvases and multipartite painting, before embarking on impastoed, midcentury modernist works in the manner of Lucio Fontana.

More recent works started with an example of Alexander Rodchenko, which was endlessly cut-and-pasted, rotated and transformed in Photoshop before becoming unrecognisable as source material. The current body of works owe as much to Matisse as they do Picasso, with windows, openings and guitar shapes all coalescing into view. While his 'late early styles' could have been considered ironic experimentation with a post-medium condition, Graham has now developed his own 'mature' expression as a painter from a position of experience and prolonged studio practice.