Paul Carr
This exhibition-specific series of small watercolours finds it’s genesis amongst some fairly basic epistemological concepts and obliquely associates them with imagery and narratives conjured up by the title The Dead. Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai and Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World both feature the setting of a village prominently in their respective plots. In the former, seven hired warriors are charged with fortifying a village, training the members of the community to be soldiers, and co-ordinating the defence of the village against an ostensibly insurmountable force of perennial marauding bandits. In the latter, a protagonist finds himself sealed within a mysterious village for a an eternity—the longer he remains there, the weaker his resolve to leave its confines becomes as he is assimilated into the community. In each case, the village is presented as an organic entity that requires insulation for the maintenance of cohesion and the prevention of intrusion. In order to exert and simultaneously preserve it’s existence, the village must be belligerent in it efforts towards self-definition. Paul Carr’s series of works on display in this exhibition considers the process of painting under a somewhat similar light. For Carr, painting as procedure is an organisational act comprised of technical and aesthetic operations. These are utilised in the construction of conceptual entities. By exerting planned control over the application of watercolour—a medium easily prone to chaos—the painted image as physical object becomes organic. Insular and epidermal, the contained aesthetic arrangement makes sense of the physical image, ordering it into existence as something rather than anything or everything else.
The Dead survey The End of the World. Weaknesses and easy points of intrusion are assessed. Preventative strategies begin to take shape., Watercolour and Gouache on Paper
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