Cheyney Thompson opens an exhibition of works at Ordet, Milan
Cheyney Thompson, To be titled, 2020.
MILAN
.- Cheyney Thompsons new series of Displacement paintings posits each canvass ground as a touch-sensitive surface. The works adopt a uniform structure of five-millimeter square black marks painted in a gridded pattern atop a white ground. Before the paint is dry, Thompson deploys an assortment of custom silicone tools against the surface, forcing the wet squares out of place. He adds no new material, but rather subjects the existing marks to this process of reorganization. The resulting transformations appear as extensions of squares into lines, glyph-like forms, and sweeping, sinuous fields of paint. Each painting has become a record of the tools interaction with the surface: the stops and starts, the kinetic limits of Thompsons body and the entropic movement of the order of painted squares into noise. But, they are also pictures, as this play of ruptures and conjure