Equilibrium
David Hawley’s paintings reveal intricate kaleidoscopic systems of reflection. They comprise of complex symmetrical motifs, which at first belie the processes through which they unfold, and their essential seriality. They aren’t simply appropriated design components formally arranged but rather motifs that unfold retrospectively within the logic of their making. It’s the development of these patterns and their relationship to one another that pulls you in towards their centres, reflecting the day to day drama between identities and categories; between phenomenology and psychology. The equilibrium in Hawley’s work is not a state of repose but of agitation, putting common definitions to the test. Using the traditions of modernist abstraction Hawley leads us somewhere between the illusion of literalness and the literalness of illusion.
The basic elements of modernist abstraction are echoed in these works – reduction, the interplay of ground and picture plane and the grid – but all these elements travel back and forth between ideality and literalness with a humorous lack of modernist conviction. The reductive starting point for Hawley is the double curved line, which through varied perspectival permutations acts as a curly grid in a self-referential game. The weave of hessian is a ready-made grid – a magnification of all woven material used as a ground. Perhaps the grid was always a ready-made but in this case a machine using thread draws it. Hawley also applies paint in a mechanistic way. Pushing paint through a piping bag or silk screen and brushed stippling are all repetitive techniques that replicate the motif or the ground whilst creating a material fraying at the edges. The design is always compromised by the accidental excess that appears in the production.
Formally these works evolve like the images in a kaleidoscope, as reflections of themselves from a central point, although not so exclusively optical. Their overt materiality creates a tension between their relentless self-replication and the instances in which they occur. In the recent large silk screen works minimalist tendencies give way to a filigree of multi-layered pattern, the earlier box paintings have been flattened, using combinations of the double curved line as both plan and elevation. The use of colour – most notably the piped lines of paint as paint, colour as itself – are now optically fluttering layers of large motifs filled with miniaturised versions of themselves.
Hawley likens his work to the palindrome (a word that reads the same backwards and forwards) but this tautological structure has now lost its innocence through relativism. Literalness becomes illusion because it’s never truly impartial, never an absolute starting point and illusion is never absolutely ideal, but infiltrates materiality in endlessly fascinating ways.
Philip Watkins, 2003