The Image Leaks the Body
A face persists through successive layers of paint, its features redrawn until portrait and surface begin to occupy the same space.
Curatorial Summary
The Image Leaks the Body begins with a face and refuses to leave it intact. Its features are drawn, covered, repeated and displaced across layers of red, blue, pink and metallic pigment. Recognition emerges through accumulation, though no single version of the face takes precedence.
Eyes, contours and fragments return in altered positions and colours. A mark can describe anatomy in one moment and dissolve into the surrounding field in the next. The distinction between figure and ground gradually loses its usefulness: both are produced through the same acts of staining, masking, tracing and repetition.
Representation enters the conditions through which a body becomes visible, legible and recognisable. The face emerges from that process already carrying its revisions.
The Image Leaks the Body continues a problem posed by The Body Leaks the Image. The inverted titles bind the two paintings together while leaving the movement between them unresolved. Body and image pass through one another; neither holds a stable position for long.
artist
statement
I kept returning to the face while painting this work, covering it and bringing it back each time in a slightly different form.
A line around an eye could become a stain. A stain could become another contour. Parts of the face disappeared under paint and resurfaced elsewhere. I stopped treating the original likeness as something the painting had to preserve.
The face matters to me because recognition accumulates there. Images settle onto it: memories, projections, inherited visual codes, other people’s readings. Painting gives me a way to make that accumulation physical. Each new layer alters what came before and changes how the face can be read.
The Image Leaks the Body grew out of the same question as The Body Leaks the Image, viewed from another direction. In one painting, the body presses beyond the image made to contain it. Here, representation begins to enter the body and participate in its construction.
The body leaks the image. The image leaks the body.
