Wayne Warren / Kristian Kragelund. VOID | macro-micro

About

Abstraction or automatic abstraction links the works in Void | micro macro Through the autonomous processes the artists employ, be it using the weather, the rain to create form or oxidisation to create pattern, texture and colour Warren and Kragelund exploit natural chemical and geological processes in the creation of their work.

The viewer is confronted with sense of the infinite - whether it be on a scale of the universe or a single cell as seen through a powerful microscope - is a subjective response to the imagery of both artists. The sense of the work as an avenue, through which the unknown may be revealed, permeates the void.

Wayne Warren's practice has, for some years now, entailed figuration which symbolised our psychological sense of being and the need to exert power and control over the forces of nature - especially the greed which determined the excessive or unconstrained production of energy in various forms. The distortion of values demanding that 'more' is the socio-political/economic determinant of success has led to over-consumption of resources and the generation of enormous negative effects of the disposal of waste on the environment. The recent series of works by Wayne Warren, titled Rain, are the result of his employing the effects of nature on his use of acrylic paint medium on various surfaces. His accession to the unknown effects of exposing the surface to the elements provides visual and sensual impressions linking the conscious with the metaphysical. It is this sense of irony that has reasserted the power of nature to be intrinsically linked to our sense of co-existence.

- Reg Newitt, 2016

Kristian Kragelund concerns himself with the object-hood of painting and the historical resonance of sculptural materiality. Through a weave of formalist and conceptual painting, the utilisation of oxidisation techniques and by appropriation of new and recycled industrial materials, he poses critical questions regarding the social and discursive histories of Western modernity. Working reductively, his meditate wall-based works possesses a striking synergy of traces of personal pasts and projections into collective futures, reminiscent, inversely, of early Minimalist art. Yet from this ambivalent glare between socioeconomic industrialism and personal spirituality, Kragelund's work perpetually attempts to re-negotiate the value of the physical object and to engage the established systems and structures defining art and contemporary culture – and as such, the discourses embedded in his works are the most contemporary.

- Jeppe Ugelvig, 2016