Blake Rayne exhbition: Solo exhibition

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Blake Rayne’s eight solo exhibition with the gallery.

A central figure in shaping current debates about painting, Rayne’s places painting within a economy of signs, revealing the components of the pictorial language and the processes through which they are defined.

Rayne’s last series of works relate to his interest in recording sequential streams of movement into painting, drawing a continuous wandering line throughout the picture plane. Rayne’s lines shift between their uncontrolled direction and their geometrical determination, namely the frame.

In this new series of paintings, a white looping line is created by a steel banding stencil that travels around the edges of the canvas. The line is lightly dusted with colored layers of sprayed acrylic paint. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions.

The repeated use of stencil techniques in Rayne’s practice reveals a script of image production through an operation that belongs to the applied arts. Other activities that conventionally belong to a painter’s domain such as folding, spraying, stretching and rolling also form part of the catalogue of procedures that has allowed Rayne to reveal, mask and test painting’s historical forms.