Paul Desborough

Landscape with Car Incident IV, 2009, acrylic, 160×110 cm

The paintings of Paul Desborough challenge our most basic assumptions about the nature of painting. His work severs the conventional bond between medium and support by being neither on canvas or panel. Instead, the paint itself becomes its own support. The artist has called this innovative working method ‘Cast Transfer’ painting. It preserves the act of making the paint mark in its essence and celebrates the very material property of the paint, allowing it to exist both as work and support. Through this creative process the work is denied the traditional status of ‘painting’. Its presentation – stretched, crumpled or positioned over, across or through any space or object – becomes an act of appropriation: the paint and its setting become one. In this way Desborough not only challenges the formal limits of painting, he also blurs the boundaries of sculpture and installation.

The content of Desborough’s work develops suggestive narratives. Here we see his intuitive instinct for abstraction collide with his technical facility in the classical tradition to offer alternate readings in a single work. At close inspection his painted surfaces reveal the presence of embedded photographic images ‘lifted’ from consumer product packaging, plastic bags and magazines. By being built into the fabric or skin of the painted surface these mass-produced ‘found’ images are individualised by the artist, while their original commercial status serves as a platform for various interpretative readings of his work.

Paul Desborough studied at Glasgow School of Art. He lives and works between London and Berlin. He has exhibited with: Hauser & Wirth, London (2009), Sassa Trulzsch, Berlin (2008), Centre Clark, Montreal (2006), ADI Projects, London (2005), Beijing Academy of Fine Art, China and Tramway, Glasgow (2005).