Bobby Dowler / I will find one
17 November, 2018 - 19 January, 2019
Galería Alegría
17 November, 2018 - 19 January, 2019
Galería Alegría
C/ Doctor Fourquet, 35
28012 Madrid, Spain
Bobby collects and re-uses found paintings-on-canvas and wood-stretcher-frame devices that have been pre-used in the past by others. Years ago, in a state of financial restriction he started to buy these cheaply from street markets however, more recently he has been receiving donated ones presented to him by friends. He adds these to his own artistic offcuts that have built up over the years. Once in his possession he analyses the paintings through separating them from their stretchers and through ordering each (the stretchers too) by approximate size, style, format or shape.
However, in general he will physically manipulate the materials with hands and with tools, often cutting with knife or scissors, applying paint by brush and in general doing whatever he feels like needs doing, until he discovers an unlikely procedural manoeuvre that can instigate the event that will help guide a work towards its final completion.
"Developments are innately unpredictable. Sometimes I won't use a certain painting or its stretcher wood for years, or I might totally destroy it, or I will use a part one day only to put it back in storage for a future consideration the next."
The materials all have their own history, and their particularities serve as an aspect of subject matter, giving Bobby a sense of what to do and how to proceed. During a protracted struggle, a ‘wrong' stretcher is often deployed to connect and frame the painted content.
It is in the nature of the work that he cannot foresee what precipitates the completion of a particular work. The discovery experience is subversive of predictable results and in the end his conclusions are not quite - or just - ordinary paintings, but what he refer to, in his naming of them, as Painting-Objects - that is ‘paintings' that have been reformed into 'objects'.