Alan Charlton

5 April - 28 April 2001

Statement made on occasion of the exhibition Here and Now:
Alan Charlton at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 1998

At Art School in 1969, I made a group of paintings, instead of using stretcher bars I went to the timber yard and chose a standard timber size often used in general joinery work. After being prepared the size is 4.5 cm, this then would be the depth of the paintings.

For the colour I chose the paint with a similar approach. Instead of buying paint from an art shop, I went to a hardware shop. Each painting was a single colour; red oxide, brown, green creosote, black, white and grey. Each achieved what I wanted, no illusions, straightforward and urban in feel. The grey painting however went beyond this.

Since that time I have continued to use 4.5 cm as the module and the paintings are always grey. I use these two constant elements to discover different ways of making the paintings. The paintings are not composed within the traditional rectangle picture frame but within the whole space of the room, therefore the space they exist in is part of the work.

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