David Pepper
"I'm not very good at speaking...You feel very free when you are painting...I was always sure I'm allowed to do this" Gerhard Richter
“David Pepper’s non-figurative works exemplify the conditions and basic elements of painting. He gives us seductive passages of luminous colour and accumulations and dispersals of density. These are not paintings created with a brush but by the controlled movement of poured liquid. His works explicitly encapsulate a temporal dimension as harnessings of moments of viscosity (varnish) over a more static and monochrome ground (gesso). In these he manipulates the protective resinous layer that covers the paint, which has traditionally played a functional role in increasing the durability of the painting as an object. This layer is transformed into the locus of primary interest and activity. With it he lets us view beautiful crystalline worlds which may be suggestive of places that have been either macroscopically diminished or microscopically enlarged in scale.”
I work as a painter using traditional materials. In my work I explore the chemical and physical interactions of paint with paint in an attempt to create beautiful and interesting images while also questioning what constitutes a traditional painting.
'Synthetic' M. mycoides cells, stained blue, after the new genome was incorporated.
"The progression of a painter's work will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer" Mark Rothko
