Studio Edward Whittaker / Yellowbox
For the past three years, Edward has focused on large-scale painting. He wants to find a role for the medium that can reflect on its contemporary reality. I study forms of visual expression: popular manifestations, the emergence of political slogans, signs, and "protest" graffiti. I have tried to put myself in a context that explores other possibilities for painting, an international visual art that is not dependent on the viewer's taste. My work tends to reject visual art in favor of heavily "textured" surfaces.
In addition to painting, I build sculpture montages involving l.e.d light, film and video, arranged in the context of architectural spaces, such as the one we have built at Yellow Box. I often use ordinary and ordinary practical objects in these works. What I do is use these installation works to question and adapt my paintings to a reality that is radically abstract. I don't know what reality can be in the context of this abstraction which is like a universal language as everything is constantly being recoded. "Abstract realism" is a style of art that interests me a lot. This idea has connections to certain critical philosophies of aesthetics and space that I try to open up to the viewer's experience. A number of works that I have recently completed all contribute to this idea and are characterized by drawn marks that work their way in and out of the morphology of the painting. As an artist, I am aware of the difficulties of decolonization while at the same time seeking the boundaries of my own history and enabling me to discover new realities in time and space.