James Cousins
Agent
12 November – 6 December 2014
Preview: Tuesday 11 November, 5-7pm 

In Agent, an exhibition of recent work, James Cousins continues his re-working of combinations of the various modes of painting that make up his completed works. Abstract schematics, tainted with depth and decoration, dismantled figurative elements, and machine-ic elements are distilled towards a kind of frozen spontaneity. Decisions embedded in narratives of process and gesture combine with conventions of appropriation (in the form of painted facsimiles lifted from photographic source material) to create a collapsible chronology. A contrast of opposites, a stayed interplay between expression and structure, brings a hazy existence to these works and is this form that keeps it perpetually reinventing itself, staving off a vanishing into meaning. As if each work forms a potential evolution of self, or a mood of self-regeneration. 

Artist statement, November 2014.