Michelle Magot

ARTIST STATEMENT London, 17th September 2004

My work presents diverse ways in which I have been approaching the relation between image and paint. The figure in my work has evolved throughout the year concerning ideas of identity and belonging in time and space.

Images refer to personal memories about particular places and particular moments, and also refer to a deliberate banal collective experience.

The paintings explore a subtle aspect that concerns a dialogue between the actual painted image with open dissolved spaces or blank areas within the space. This internal dialogue not only represent a specific moment or place but also concerns questions more related to the formal meanings of paint as a language and the associations this may suggest through art history. I don’t intend to refer to any specific art period but some of the works suggest an intimate romantic picture with panoramic landscapes disrupted by abstract elements or banal gestures that seem no to belong, like a dull and awkward gesture were both refer to self and separation more generally.

 At this stage of my work I feel engaged in a search of the meaning of representation in art and particularly in painting as language, to explore the nature of memory from a personal and collective experience and interpretation, considering the possibility that in my work they may be indistinguishable from one another.