Some panels are individual works, others are grouped to create a larger entity. One aspect of the group works is the physical re-arrangement of individual painted panels – shifted around, rotated, linked, spaced apart. There is a tension between the ‘sovereignty’ of individual panels and the dialogue of these parts within the arrangement. The work follows on from paintings on plywood using signpainters’ enamel, and multi-screen digital animations.
Widespread familiarity with ‘Coke Cola’ is used as the basis for creating paintings that can evoke specific responses linked to a product, but also address anxieties about the influence of corporate branding – the steady erosion of the private sphere in the face of commercial pressures on the consumer.
Awareness of a brand can trigger desire simply by association; colour and logo activating a broad area of play between abstract formality and associations dredged up from the consumer subconscious. The ‘Coke’ paintings are re-worked from memory, drawing on the accumulation of advertising imagery that we encounter on a daily basis. The imagery is memorized, re-worked, chopped, edited. The work explores the point at which the link the consumer makes to a product can be broken; successive minor alterations cancel out any associations, cutting it loose, casting it adrift.
Yet each brand is vunerable to market pressures which force the pace of continual change and maintainance, or face the prospect of terminal decline in the wake of its competitors.
