L’artista / ch’a l’abito de l’arte ha man che trema.
The artist / who has the habit of art and a hand that trembles.

(Dante – Paradiso 13.77-78)

Why does the hand tremble? The body trembles as the heart beats, in pain and pleasure, almost imperceptibly, but there is the trembling of anxiety or exhilaration when faced with the freedom of action and its consequences. We can see in the late paintings of Titian, as observed by Giorgio Agamben, evidence of the trembling hand. What does this mean? What is the trembling hand of the painter? Diana’s bow is still tensed in Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, a painting in the National Gallery in London that I visited so many times as a student. Actaeon, after straying into Diana’s secret bathing place, is transformed into a stag by her and sees his own reflection in a stream before being devoured by his own hunting hounds. All painting needs tension in one form or another, but at heart, it is ontological tension that gifts the work its poetic significance. At the very end of his life, Titian seems to have intentionally unlearned something. In so doing, his work gets to the fecund paradox in the secret essence of painting. There is nothing really comparable in the Venetian school to his waywardness. There is less definition in his brushwork along with a more languid, uncertain quality, yet the late paintings are very unsettling and strange.

The body of the painter, operates as it sees fit when tensed between the potential of the intent and the resistance manifest in the distance of non-action. A sense of the absurd contrasts simultaneously with the thrill of invention, the hand, as it paints, trembles in this knowledge. Everything can just as easily be or not be. Matisse, when faced with his failing body in old age resorted to the cut-outs. We can observe in his shaky scissored lines and shapes a kind of truth, less to do with a physical disability and more to do with a willful side-stepping of skill, yet despite this strategic shift, we realise we cannot escape our body and its habits, we self-consciously harness them by transforming them into a kind of mannerism.

What is my daily routine in the studio? Perhaps, despite the timetable I follow, and a matter-of-fact working procedure, it is not a routine at all, but rather, the immersion in an ongoing contradiction. My painting moves between total disintegration and the assertive invention of forms, between impulse and rejection, between liquidity and solidification, between light and dark and the boundlessness of colour. Daily life seeps into the studio; small joys, the banal or mundane. I hear the murmurs and the shouts of passersby from the street. The world of my environment wants to force its way into the work - contours of mountains, clouds and trees, the curvature of the human spine or a shadow on a table top, but my paintings stubbornly insist on being objects. I know that ‘Object’ comes from the medieval Latin Objectum, a thing presented to the mind, which in turn comes from ob- in the way of, and jacere to throw. So, paintings as objects are things which are thrown against themselves – are in conflict with themselves through colliding forces; figure/ground, image/object, destruction/creation. There is something which inherently resists the projection of the impulse and no matter how hidden, the work exists in a permanent state of convulsion. The only way out of this dilemma is to accept the challenge it presents. But what kind of a challenge is this? It is the return to the origin, a return to the source where these forces play out and beget everything else that comes into being in the studio. There is no naivety or innocence in this return, like Nicolas of Cusa’s On learned ignorance, it is despite everything that has been learned and known.

The works exhibited in Temblor are a selection of paintings from different family groups made during the last three or four years. Worked on simultaneously, the family groups are a strategy I have developed, which while sharing the same painterly DNA, is the wish to keep the work open and fluid, contrasting resemblance and difference. The Ovidian Metamorphosis portrayed by Titian, points the way to an endless dynamic modulation arising from an intrinsic instability: this my modus-operandi as a painter. Perhaps the real significance of a work is the spirit in which it is made, the attitude, how it is made, how it is painted, how it extends from my body – the touch and how it is presented. In painting, it often seems we move away from the world of things, but in reality, abstraction is a deeply emotional return to a place where things come into being for the first time.