Damien Flood | Herbert Warmuth

In the paintings of DAMIEN FLOOD, formal fragments move outside a uniform spatial-illusionistic structure. There is no holistic composition, no narrative context to which they can be assigned. Rather, in the free arrangement of the elements, which oscillate between image citation and realism, the dissolution of affiliations and motivic liabilities is program. Going beyond their objective definition - their interpretation, for example, as an arm, a pear or a vessel - the motifs, sometimes transformed as amorphous condensations of color into the total abstraction of purely painterly settings, emerge above all as pictorial archetypes to structure the composition, in their relationship to each other and to the picture surface. 

The formal language of HERBERT WARMUTH can be understood as a reduction to minimal or basic pictorial conditions. Almost casually, he lets the pictorial surface become a motif, exploring both the materiality of the image carrier covered with canvas and its relationship - as a bodily object - to the surrounding space. In recent works, the illusionistic pictorial space is broken up in favor of a material intervention: Substance swells through a slit in the surface.