Blake Rayne exhbition: Wallace Nutting and Julia Hill

Sutton Lane is pleased to present the first exhibition of works by New York artist Blake Rayne in London. The exhibition consists of 13 paintings and is dedicated to Wallace Nutting and Julia Butterfly Hill.

Rayne is interested in staging an obsolete historical orientation towards painting as a way of creating a discord with the way paintings and other images ask to function in the present.

The paintings focus on process and refuse any interest in producing thematic or communicative representations. Each painting is constructed through a sequence of « layers ». Each layer is thought of as a discreet process with its own concerns and without the aim to produce a synthesis of the layers. The layers of process aren’t seen meaningful in themselves, neither do they function as a meaningful strategy. The paintings act as a display of the steps and highlight the procedures, such as selection, translation, and transformation. By making paintings that display their narrative of production, Rayne « mimics » other narratives or conditions of production under which paintings are produced.

For example the « image » in the abstract paintings is only the result of a process of warping the canvas and therefore only a record of one stage of the paintings production in time. Like light on photo sensitive film, spray paint falls onto the folded canvas, but unlike in a photogram there are non external referents i.e. pins, dust etc. creating evidence of their existence in the representation.