Artspace

Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint' (detail), 2017. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Arthur Georgeson

Overview

In this new Ideas Platform project, Wet Paint, Mark Titmarsh asks: When did painting become a thought experiment? When did it shift from being a craft-based discipline of hard material things to become theoretical, immaterial, approaching the process of thinking, as light as thought and ideas?

Featuring highly coloured and reflective substances, Wet Paint appropriates the floor and the wall as surrogate sites for the expansion and convergence of painting into all other disciplines. There is a subtle shift from an exclusive focus on the look of the work to an interest in the poetics of production and how that leaves a trace above and beyond the aesthetics of visual appearance.

Wet Paint includes an opening night performance where the artist becomes the surface upon which colour is applied, with remnants from the event to remain as part of the overall installation.

Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer
Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer
Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer
Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer
Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer
Mark Titmarsh, 'Wet Paint', 2017, installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer