Garth Weiser

About

Emergent images in Weiser’s abstract paintings flicker in and out of focus like analogue TV static. Ghosts of cartoon-like figures puncture the surfaces, shape-shifting as the eye is teased through dense layers of dots and drips, scumbles and scrapes, peaks and troughs. Over the last six years, Weiser has been focused on a slow excavation of form and content through a process akin to the erosion of sedimentation. His paintings are built from layering unseen paintings, each representing a different history in terms of content, forms and materiality. The textured surface is then mined at the end of this long process to reveal a dynamic, fossilised slab. The resultant vascular surfaces of the paintings trigger chromatic vibrations and optical illusions. Multiple perspectives and after-images emerge and recede with tributaries feeding and looping back into one another. The paintings are battle-scarred and, like cave-drawings, show the beginnings of a new language. Simultaneously ancient and futuristic, organic forms loom and twist, complicating the foreground and compromising figurative associations. As Weiser’s pull & push drama is played out on the canvas, fictional worlds are driven to the surface forcing a dynamic engagement with the viewer. Weiser’s process is an investment in labour, time and production, in looking and re-evaluating. These paintings acknowledge how we live simultaneously in a world with absences and presences, through haunting evocations of the simulated and the real.