For a number of years Philip Lumai has been working on five distinct series of works. The exhibition at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow featured paintings selected from three of them: Doubles & Halves, Strange Creatures and Grey Forms. Further information is available on the artist’s website: philiplumai.com.
Doubles & Halves
2023, oil on linen, 201 x 225 cm
In the paintings from Lumai’s Doubles & Halves series the colour encounters the limit of a rectangle. As the artist describes it: “This line is not actually drawn or marked in itself, it is a limit that is encountered
It is literally a fold in the canvas that changes the physical territory of the space. The double rectangle (or half rectangle) is made visible through an action which encounters its contours and not by tracing its linear existence or defining its geometric reality. I believe that in mathematics an intersecting line that encounters a rectilinear line is called an ‘event’ (it is something that happens to that line or on that line) and similarly, in the Doubles & Halves works, it is the pure event of painting, with a mobility and pulse of its own, that encounters the rectilinear form’s apparent limit.”
“In making and building the bodies of colour for these paintings there is something very important for me to consider; that the colour will never appear as a surface, but instead remain objectively plastic. It won’t be diluted or even particularly spread out. If the gestures do collide and integrate it is not from the surface that the work acts or emits its strength. Instead the colour has to stand up, it has a different physical task, a different sort of life and a different expressive necessity.”
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In Lumai’s Doubles & Halves paintings, the space is as primary and indispensable as the gestures. These cannot be removed from the space and the space is peculiarly attached to them. Space and gesture affect each other. The gestures are grossly material compared to the space that they appear in, but for all their intensity they are temporally contingent and spatially limited. They are structured modes of repetition, an insistent process of calibrated sameness and change. Lumai’s mark is a sign of a performative operation; a touch between the hesitant and the certain; between eye and hand. He calls it his painter’s diagram – his unique signature.
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Strange Creatures
2022, oil, acrylic and spray paint on paper and linen,
28.5 x 24.5 cm
2024, oil, acrylic and spray paint on paper and linen,
28.5 x 24.5 cm
Strange because that is what they have to appear to the organised side of Lumai’s mind, and creatures because they have to arrive and appear to him as something other.
“I can’t really think of these works in terms of composition. I would like to think that, in the end, I am able to achieve an indissoluble whole from the different materials – paint, paper and linen support. The paper is cut from a book – it’s already been painted on to a large extent – and mounted on the canvas. The canvas has also already received some colour and the painting will then receive more or less reworking, more or less colour; it differs from piece to piece.”
“Far from being simplifications of my larger works, preparations or drawings, they have moved into another position: cramming a relative complexity of colour relationships and marks into a small space that invites a close viewing. I would suggest using a magnifying glass.”
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Grey Forms
2019, spray-paint and oil on linen, 83 x 79.5 cm
For Philip Lumai his Grey Forms are “like ‘grey areas’ – indistinct in terms of shape, uncertain, like ideas searching for their objectivity.” But within them is an inner generative structure, and form unfolds from its own intrinsic qualities. A dynamic is at play that speaks of the malleability and change that we live amongst.
Usually two or three greys are mixed before starting. The linen is not stretched at the start. The painting is worked on the floor.
Grey, here, is not just a colour. It is also an idea, condition and material – a thing in and of itself. Grey connotes ambiguity, a purposive indeterminacy of meaning. One can talk of the ‘inbetweeness’ and irresolution of grey, but equally grey can have a generative and organising function in a painting. Jasper Johns used grey because he wanted to isolate the pure facts of touch in order to perceive and understand the physicality of paint. The figures in Giacometti’s paintings are embodied from an armature founded on grey tonalities. In grey, touch becomes, potentially, both form and image; colour both immanent and present.
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