Introduction by Pafo Gallieri

When looking at Kevin’s latest visual productions, one might feel like they are staring into a world of electronic impulses, pixels and meshes. Those elements, now far from the digital world where they belong, have been reshaped back into the traditional medium of Painting, like in some sort of anachronistic game. This process is the result of the time that the artist had spent wandering in the virtual world.

Having studied Painting in the early Eighties and then embarking on a studio Painting practice into the early Nineties, he started working with 3D software whilst creating both physical and digital art eventually focussing on the latter. He has produced works ranging from video art to most recently NFT’s. It was only a couple of years ago that Kevin felt the need to return to Painting. He is now operating like software but instead of the usual hardware is supported by thick layers of oils and acrylics, brushes, paper and canvas. In this universe of ‘hand painted CGI’ we come face to face with a final boss from a 90’s arcade game. Unnervingly he is staring with all his thirty eyes just moments before the fight kicks in, or we could get lost in a surreal desert from the latest VR headset. These elements are transfigured through his ‘Bad Painter’ treatment and there is often an unsettling feeling in this peculiar bit-fauve style. Overall, the techno-pop component that comes through these works is due to the influence of video games and probably before that comics had a hand in informing his aesthetic. On the other hand, the increasing degrees of abstraction often tend to almost destroy the representation and unveil the author’s intention of criticizing the digital world, a place in which he felt to some degree caged. In this sense, these works ultimately could be seen as an attempt to reclaim reality through Painting and can be read as a declaration of creative freedom.

Artist’s Statement

I paint stories about the World I inhabit, a subjective and an objective world, though I don’t consider my Painting autobiographical. Stories are paths crisscrossing a landscape with junctions, bridges and tunnels snaking in and around one another, sometimes meeting and branching out as they intersect.

Knots and coils feature heavily in my drawings and lots of characters career and bash around paths and spaces. These Paintings and drawings are explorations of the vast complexities of the nest that is the World. A Trauma Garden as a tangling mesh enveloping and spitting out seeds from a Lonely Planet. The World teems with life and trauma, but also brims with enjoyment and exuberance. These contradictions and combinations drive my image making. 

Painting is an engagement with a process of flows and bottlenecks. The Paint needs to take over without too much interference from me. It appears coarse and uncontrolled but that’s a misconception. I make both random and reasoned decisions, take chances with impulsive control giving rise to unpredictable and interesting things. Allowing, denying, braking, accelerating, stopping. This is mostly how it goes. Planned chaos.

I am selective about colour, drawn to rich crimsons, striking blues, pungent earths with a bit of lush green thrown in, maybe some colliding blacks and whites.

Characters run around in cracked landscapes, searching crumbling buildings for something they don’t know. Monsters from the Id Dreaming in Public. It’s all a bit apocalyptic but I’m not apologetic about that.

Bio

I was born in central London growing up in the suburbs near Heathrow. I have ancestry from Scandinavia, Western Asia, Britain, East and South Europe enabling me to evolve a hybrid identity. My early employments in the seventies and eighties, were in the engineering, fabrication and construction industries, often on military installations like airfields, weapons research establishments and army bases. I believe these environments have significantly informed much of the subject matter my image making investigates. These were the Cold War Years and these sites were populated by the visceral machinery of nuclear paranoia.

I later travelled Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas enhancing my hybrid view of culture. I studied Painting in London in the eighties and then worked with various artist groups in London and Europe exploring a variety of forms including film, video, performance and sound. In the nineties this led me to become involved in early computer art and animation. I went on to teach Computer Generated Imaging and Animation in art schools including Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and the National Film and Television School and worked on numerous independent experimental films, videos and virtual productions. During Covid lockdown I realised I was exhausted by screens and digitalia and returned to Painting moving into a studio space in East London.

One of my favourite contemporary artists is the Romanian Painter, Adrian Ghenie. I particularly like the way he appears to fluently sample and mix art history and cinematic imagery using both gritty and smooth application. My own personal history feels reflected in a similarly contrasting combination of approaches and I aim to allow my painting method generate it’s own imaginative surfaces.