Andrew Vass

Artist statement

Vass's work is bound up with the fusion of mark making and looking: they record the probing of the eye as it is translated into a materiality, an idea expressed eloquently by Roland Barthes: 'The line, however light, or uncertain it may be, always refers to a force, to a direction; it is an energon, a labour which reveals' which makes legible 'the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure. The line is a visible action.' In the drawings and paintings of Andrew Vass we find a similar energon' whereby the mark or the trace is a unit for directly building and constructing without losing any sense of this physicality or sensuality.

Often made on location, Vass's drawings document a particular interface between the artist and a specific perceptual grasp of what lies before him: pressure and erasure document proximity and distance, the movement of the eye, and the sensation of perceived planes and masses; grasping in his words, 'a property that lies between surface and image.'

In this way, the paintings and drawings actively produce space: a space that reverberates somewhere between observation and construction, rather like what Willem de Kooning referred to as a 'glimpse'. Moreover it is a painterly space that isn't about grounding representations, an idea which can ultimately be related back to specific urges within modernism: that of the naturalistic and the anti-naturalistist.

What Vass manages to hold on to is both positions, while acknowledging that his works ultimately possess an 'independent life'.

Adapted from the essay 'Frequency' by David Ryan 2005