A beautiful hand-made limited edition volume containing the artist’s own texts and paintings.
This artist’s edition documents the production of a series of paintings by Simon Barney. A tactile object hand-made from the finest papers, materials and printing. It features a traditional fiction format text section with torn fore edges wedged between contrasting art pages. Written by Barney, the texts are playful and reflective and can be read alongside the paintings. The larger format pages are in two sections: an extensive selection of working drawings and a set of seventeen paintings reproduced in colour.
Simon Barney is a painter and curator of the long running exhibition project Briefcase (in which the exhibition was carted around town by Barney in a briefcase). His exhibitions include: How Things Fall Silvershot, Melbourne 2008; Rimbaud/Rambo Neon Parc, Melbourne 2008; Situation Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2005; Hospitality Foxy Productions, New York 2001.
The title Screen Fade refers directly to the depicted screens that have lost their internal light and, more importantly, to an eroding of a kind of screen realism that governs our representations. Barney says: ‘In these paintings of discarded technology, the incidental arrangement on the street provided an impetus or suggestion for an arrangement on the canvas. The paintings draw away from the glowing screens that attract us like moths. Where technology avowedly pulls us towards knowledge, art leans toward the light of unknowing. Paint – the intermediary here – provides, in its flow and deposit, a construction governed more by sympathy than coherence. The scene is deferred, slowed, still coming into view.’
Screen Fade is signed and numbered by the artist in a limited edition of 250 copies. Published by Formist (Sydney).
116 pages, 196 × 240, hardcover, Formist (Sydney).