Exhibition text:

Dear Simon,

In your recent series, you make sculptural reproductions of existing paintings, and I have been wondering for quite some time now what that means. For years I have been fascinated and bewildered by the role assigned to images, the status we grant them, and what images themselves might be capable of producing.

Your work restores attention to partially forgotten paintings by not-yet-entirely-forgotten painters. In the same gesture, you also perform a violent act: the images, which in themselves have never been able to move or speak, petrify into metal sculptures in your works. It is not yet entirely clear to me what exactly it is you take away from them. Figuration? In that sense, your reiterations might just as well constitute a great liberation, one that frees them or allows them, at last, real expression. The paint reveals itself as defiant, and you render them even more distinctive. It is precisely here that the images begin to speak again, maybe more…