Che Lovelace. Paintings

About

The use of combined board panels to create paintings began from the practical need to find a painting support that is stable, archival, relatively inexpensive and one that I could source here in Trinidad.

It was a slow process but eventually I began considering these dividing edges of the panels as a way to rethink the version of space I was making in the picture.

By treating each panel as a separate entity, while simultaneously building a larger scene, I started to break up the expected sequence by which I constructed the image.

I was constantly confronted with these breaks on the surface - sometimes I ignored them, running color over the seams. In other moments I made abrupt stops at these boundaries.

I used both fresh new panels or discarded panels from failed compositions lying around in the studio. And so it goes, in a kind of back and forth, I was at once disrupting and mending the image.

I covered and obscured the underbelly of the painting by introducing a figure, elements of a landscape or architecture. Suddenly, the painting would be in the realm of recognizable things. Chance configurations and glimmers of abstraction gave way to a new superimposed image.

This fluctuation is constant. The goal is always to make the parts whole again.

-Che Lovelace