Paul Winstanley Art School 5, 2013 Oil on panel 114 x 76 cm Over two summers Paul Winstanley meticulously documented the empty spaces, omitting not one art school, in a thorough and complete study. The spaces captured have previously been overlooked and undocumented, the resulting images present minimal spaces of creative potential. The flow of images that comprise this archive distil into an ideal of art school; of what it is and how it appears to be. The images have a consistent format of vertical orientation, shallow field of focus, flat composition and exact recording of the subject as found. From this archive a series of paintings has been developed. The paintings closely subscribe to this minimal experience of place that is both documentary and sublime. They describe place and yet become, themselves, objects of space defined as much by the transience of light on surfaces as place articulated. Painted on panel, they physically reflect the hard surfaces of walls and screens within the imagery and re live the memory of place as both illusion and object. The visual language approaches abstraction and yet these paintings never lose sight of their social and political content.
