Jeremy Lawson

Jeremy Lawson primarily works with oil paints on canvas, although he began his career as a conceptual sculptor. Working with everyday materials such as sandbags and steel, Lawson’s earlier works examined issues surrounding property, climate and the environment. His paintings, however, have not lost this critical sensibility. His process involves the impulsive characteristics of action painting, while he simultaneously seeks to fulfil the aesthetic needs of each piece. Rejecting the use of tools, Lawson uses his hands to apply wet pigment to the canvas, with only thin pieces of palette paper separating his touch from the surface. This self-imposed restraint gives way to amorphous figures, gestural slippages and smudges. Loose figurative elements emerge from the recursive layers of paint, but patchworks of concrete colors dominate most pieces. In his own words he must “break the piece and rework it for the painting to come into its own”, seeking to establish an equilibrium and harmony between his own intuition and the painting’s own direction. Fragments of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealist Automatism and Art Brut surface in his oeuvre, yet Lawson’s fascination with the fruitful potential of creative destruction paves the way for rousing new work.