David Small, Jeremy Willett - 'Desire Lines'

About

from correspondence between the artists...

"'Synth like'. It's almost as if imagining a wilderness, an organic, biological mesh of industrial decline - a jungle overwhelming an edifice, a public sculpture, an art studio - through a 'synthetic' filter. As your process of rendering imaginings of organic forms through digitised means, are then again regurgitated through a craft that is in itself non-digital...(or maybe un-digital is a better phrase.) It's cyclical, and it makes me think of the heavily patterned rugs hung on the walls in The Shining, put there by Kubrick to subliminally make the audience feel trapped, as if in a maze. But that's the reference, isn't it? The jungle - as you say, overgrown. It's saturation, and it's a feeling or sense of both object, the field, ambience and noise, growth and decay. Lots of words I know, but I have a fine scotch in my hand and am very excited by the images you've sent. I love the granular, pixelated quality of the two tone. I've always thought about how I can make my work seem tangible and virtual at the same time. Never managed it, but the combination of the print and painting seem to point it in the right direction.The sculptural element of the print really comes across, and also the deterioration, from what feels like oversaturation of process, which I love. there's also an over-blowness about them. Like they're ready to burst. As if you could imagine the print and painting ensemble to be micro and macrocosmic to some extent. The fine detail and the ever-expanding. Ever play the guitar? Like a Fender Twin Reverb amp on the clean channel, then switching on a Hyper Fuzz pedal. Make any sense?..."

and from writer Amy Pettifer

Continuing his exploration of the discreet elements of urban non-places via digital processes - which has included using 3D printing technology to produce computer crafted replica of roadside weeds - Jeremy Willett has made a hand printed, silkscreened wallpaper which covers the interior of studio1.1.
Derived from small sections of the exteriors of municipal buildings and housing estates in East London where he lives, Willet has rendered the ubiquitous textures of pebble dash, thickly layered Artex paint and bush hammered concrete as over enlarged pixelated repeats. Beginning with a photograph, the image is reduced and drawn pixel by pixel to make a smooth pattern, but just as digital glitches can produce ill positioned pixels, the process of hand silk-screening also invites analogue mistakes, the paint lifting from the screen in material blips or losses.
The wallpaper’s stripped down pictorial definition is akin to the aesthetic of early 16-bit video games, where backgrounds were constructed from endlessly repeated blocks of landscape representing stone, water and grass. As much as this image constructs, it also deconstructs the closer you are to it; the image disintegrating into the fuzz of barcodes, data scrambling, TV static and white noise - ever present elements of the architecture of modern living.