Bump makes for a hearty soup, with the paintings in this Episode making manifest the heady, electric variation of such jarring, twitchy germination. The bump can be the impossibly meticulously rendered hair of an eyelid; the elongated, evaporating sweep of a single brushstroke; the rumpus of one colour thwarting the harmony of its surrounding palette; the absence that replaces an expected presence. Bumps phrase painterly singularities, where nothing momentarily becomes something and vice versa, triggering compositions and their protagonists into various states of alarm, action and even ambiguity. They survive across spectra of expression, in plains both hyper-realistic and amoebic and care not for the forms and planes they influence. Whilst they may dislocate or discombobulate, bumps always seek to orchestrate the flux and fizz of a painted surface, simultaneously positioning and empowering themselves as cause, effect and aftermath of a composition’s mark, matter and meaning, leading it – and us – into the light.
Bump not only speaks to the interior of a pictorial surface but also to the inspirations, agitations, and celebrations an artist experiences when painting outside of it and which – wittingly and unwittingly – are carried by their brush, so that their work become ‘scapes of synapses. Bumps nourished by mosaics of micro responses to the world in which these artists live, love and learn. It is inside these bumps – those that live in the artist’s head and jump like Donne’s flea onto their support in leaps of interrogation yet consolidation – that the DNA of a painter’s practice and language foams, bubbling to the surface as sign, then signifier, only to ebb back into the itch and architecture of the image or arrangement they permeate.