(click image for more details)Untitled (Meteor), 2007
oil and spray paint on aluminium
40cm x 27.2cm
Black Lacquer, 2007
74cm x 135cm x 85cm
Untitled (Acid Lemon II), 2007
20cm x 25cm
Paul Merrick employs a processed-based approach to painting to investigate colour, space and the relationship between painting and sculpture and architecture. The work contains a knowing nod to art historical references as well as a playful pleasure in mark making for its own ends – it is both technically precise while also embracing the possibility of chance and accident.
Working for many years in two dimensions, his paintings are usually realised on box-like stretchers (using MDF and aluminium rather than canvas) which imposes particular behavioural patterns on the paint itself, allowing a longer time frame for the artist within which to manipulate it using a variety of tools, adding, layering, scraping away, and sanding down to create a multitude of stylistic motifs and marks.
All of these elements create an optical illusion that lend Merrick's paintings a peculiarly three-dimensional aspect, one in contrast to the actuality of their surfaces. It is perhaps only logical that in more recent years he has expanded his practice beyond the boundaries of the pictorial frame, creating sculptures that often utilise found objects, what appear to be studio off-cuts or materials rescued from a skip as the grounds for his further painterly explorations.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
