Thing Language

Executed on a monumental scale, Thing Language is a mesmerising example of Paul Bloodgood’s distinctive abstract works, which combine bold geometries, vibrant colours and sinuous lines to create dynamic painterly fields. His works begin life as collages, fusing his own biomorphic forms with fragments cut from reproductions of works by other artists. From this, Bloodgood creates an oil study which extrapolates the fundamental contours of the composition, and serves as a blueprint for the final painting. Interspersing organic forms with patches of white space, the work hovers before the viewer like a piece of cartography: a quivering, neuronal landscape that seems to map the rhythmic fluctuations of the mind. Evoking the languages of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Jackson Pollock, Bloodgood’s abstract paintings seek to bridge the gap between the natural world and the human psyche. ‘Nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind’, he explains, ‘and this is the engagement I would like to encourage.’