Mark Galea

Standard

June 7th – 29th, 2024

Standard is a response to a series of paintings that were made during the Victorian Covid 19 lockdown and later exhibited at Occasional Space, Carlton. The earlier series was called, untitled, incidental format, referring to the support on which the paintings were made, either found sections of board or offcuts from other projects. The colours I used were mainly leftovers from earlier works and the painted areas at each end of the boards were always squares. The scale of the overlapping sections, where colours are layered and mixed to create new colours, was dependent on the dimensions of each board.

In Standard, each of the painting groups is based on a standard 90 x 120 cm piece of board readily available from building suppliers. The first painting measures 90 x 120 cm, the second group comprises two horizontal panels measuring 45 x 120 cm, the third, two vertical panels measuring 90 x 60 cm and so on. The number of cuts increased progressively throughout the series, and many new standard sizes were created.

The first step was to paint a square at each end of the board and the initial colours were personal responses based on how much of each colour was going to remain visible. Successive applications of paint responded to these colours in turn, sometimes systematic and formal, and sometimes less so. I am interested in the gloaming light that occurs toward the end of the day and I’ve tried to capture a sense of this in these paintings. Some colour relationships are references to nature – all of them are colours I like using for their optimism.