When a man realises he has two lives, an abstract life in which his mind resides and a concrete life in which his mind also resides, he either ends up like a madman who hides one of his lives out of fear and acts out the other, or like an artist who has no fear and risks them both. (1)

     Paintings are maps of uncharted places the artist comes back with to say look this is where I've been. I ventured in to labyrinths unwinding my string behind me.
    

     The parameters of each journey are set, and adhered to :- the resulting image is unknowable. Whether it is the binary code detailing the flow, weight, movement of the human hand mimicking a machine process, or the repeated iterations of random processes, these works can be thought of as anti-teleological, conceptually synchronous with the dissipative force of entropy, that which drives a system of order to disorder. Some of these works utilise systems, others processes in which the making of the thing becomes the thing itself, the parameters of its physical conditions determining its eventual form. They shape themselves, unhindered by significance, constructed of the most basic of elements. They are non-form, yet they form themselves.
    

     These works utilise contingency at some point within their construction (specifically contingency, rather than chance, as the chance within the paintings is guaranteed by conditions set up in advance) therefore allowing me to cede subjective control over the eventual image. Some works are a re-presentation of data. Works such as "Lottery", (data: 5 years of winning National Lottery numbers) and "Pi" reconfigure number sequences to another, more visual format, a translation from one language to another.
    

     I think these paintings are about both the making of paintings and the looking at paintings, about the human need to make sense of things, to order and classify, to discern the pattern. The world is full of a disconcertingly large amount of information, but there are moments, like something seen out of the corner of the eye, when a sense of something emerges, an intuition of near understanding. At the same time, these objects refer explicitly to the process of their making, and therefore to time, the duration of the work. This duration (of both production and reception) is not, paradoxically, an actuality of pure presentness, but something which can only be alluded to.
    

     Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval tipping forever time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.
Yet the instant of actuality is all we can ever know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals... (2)

I can think of no better description of my work than the words Robert Smithson used to describe his own. It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.

© Sax Impey 2002

1. Michaelangelo Pistoletto, Famous Last Words
2. George Kubler, The Shape of Time