Oliver Perkins‌, David Brian Smith

Monochrome painting offers the possibility of a pure, simple object, something devoid of content other than the shape and colour of the canvas. Famously, Rodchenko proclaimed ‘I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation’. Yet, as a potential end point in painting, the idea of the monochrome has paradoxically been a highly productive one.

Neither David Smith nor Oliver Perkins is a practitioner of monochrome paintings per se. Both have wider practices. But like many artists, they see the monochrome as something elemental within the activity of painting that invites further exploration.

Oliver Perkins’s incorporation of structures under the canvas takes his paintings into the realm of the sculptural. It gives them a further dimension. The creation of this extra dimension takes place within the basic process of making a painting – the structure is an addition to the stretcher bars, made prior to the stretching of the canvas. It’s a process that brings an obvious, palpable tension, the canvas being stretched to a high degree of tautness in order for it to lay flat, as would be its normal state, but restrained from doing so by the implanted form. Each painting-object has several layers of differently coloured paint applied to its surface, though this is not to create a new colour through overlaying, rather a process of experimentation with very different colours to find one that’s the right fit. Once the right colour is found two or three more layers of paint are applied until solidity is achieved.

David Smith creates an extra dimension of sorts through the addition of fluorescent tape to the sides of his paintings which produces a glow of extended colour. Smith’s palette for some of these paintings is a decidedly refined and mysterious one. In fact the paint is the sediment collected from the bottom of brush cleaning pots, giving colours which are unique, never to be found again. Elsewhere Smith uses raw pigment to achieve pure one colour, paintings. With ‘August 40’ the pigment is ground straight into the surface, the act of which brings painterly effects into play. For Smith this introduction of painterliness is an important counter to the flatness and sublimated brushstrokes of works like ‘August 02’.