On Building Houses

John Oxborough's new work centres around the notion of childhood and the nature of memory. Although drawn from the artist's present and day-to-day life, his figurative paintings appears as fragmented recollections from a half-forgotten past.

Oxborough's style draws heavily on the ideas of European Modernists, whose break from rigid naturalism allowed artists and viewers to explore representation and perception from entirely new directions. The still life remained a popular subject in these early years of the 20th century for the same reason that it is employed here: the immediacy and familiarity of the content allows for a fuller range of possibilities for formal deconstruction and reinterpretation.

For Oxborough, however, formal deconstruction is not an end itself, but rather a means by which he is able to further explore the function and meaning of memory. The fluidity of line and form wear away the physicality of the objects he depicts. The image is not inscribed deliberately but allowed to emerge, as the often chaotic and incomplete forms intersect and overlap. In this way, his work borrows the notion of the simultaneity of time from Picasso's Cubism. The image is not a definite moment or memory, but a synthetic experience patched together from a lifetime of evermore abstract recollections.

Unlike his Cubist forebears, Oxborough uses colour freely as a both a formal component and to suggest a narrative. In each of his new works, bold colours play against a monochromatic background, creating an obvious point of focus within his often disordered compositions. For Oxborough, colour is not only a symbolic marker but also a means to resolve the weight of a composition in a way that is difficult to achieve with charcoal alone.

There is a continued emphasis on the notion of childhood in these works, with a constant focus being placed on the emotional artefacts of the artist's youth and his present life as a father. A toy motorcycle burns against a black tabletop; a child appears, barely emerged and inchoate, against the white space of an unremembered past. Always, colour is the means by which these objects become the focus of the work, a suggestion of the clarity of these particular memories and a comment on the process of perception and recollection.

Above all, however, Oxborough is concerned with the meaning and function of painting. The conceptual concerns of his pieces are subjugated by his abiding preoccupation with the nature of composition, and the formal aspects of form, colour and line. As a result, these works explore not only the philosophy of memory and perception, but of art itself.