Alexander & Susan Maris
Extracts from THE TRUTH IN PAINTING [Sans +R], 1990-93
book-ash from an unread volume of Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting in acrylic medium, and book-ash from a read volume of Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting in acrylic medium on canvas
30.5 x 66 x 2 cm overall (2 parts)
Roger Ackling (whose work preceded this in the current sequence of THE UNSEEN MASTERPIECE) made a 50-year career by burning tiny marks onto the surface of objects with a magnifying...
Roger Ackling (whose work preceded this in the current sequence of THE UNSEEN MASTERPIECE) made a 50-year career by burning tiny marks onto the surface of objects with a magnifying glass. It was a form of creative, meditative transformation, staying still and channelling the energy of the sun. Alexander and Susan Maris’s act of burning 'The Truth in Painting' was made in a different spirit, but with no less conceptual and reflective motivation. The artists took two copies of Jacques Derrida’s 1978 text to the wilds of Rannoch Moor– one of which they had read, one they hadn’t - and burned both, capturing the ashes and mixing them with acrylic medium to make pigment with which they painted two simple monochromes, in subtly different tones of grey. We exhibited these in 2009 alongside works by Francis Alys, Callum Innes and Cornelia Parker in an exhibition that took its title from Alys’s work 'Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing': an exhibition about creative destruction and transformation.
Exhibitions
Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing
Ingleby Gallery
14th February - 28 March 2009