Fireeye Elevator

Location

Country: France
City: Paris
Place: British Embassy

Michael Stubbs’ paintings are constructed by pouring configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paint onto MDF board. Within the poured layers, Stubbs adds a range of graphic stencils or cut-out decorative shapes.  Fireeye Elevator adds a layer of tinted floor varnish to the mix, creating an idiosyncratic blend of decorator’s equipment and graphic materials that questions the idea of what constitutes a painting and how it is made. 

Fireeye Elevator takes the first part of its title from a cyber security company. Some of the graphic imagery – that might at first sight seem entirely random – mimic shapes such as grenades or screens or unreadable fragments of text. These visual interruptions are, as critic John Chilver describes in the introduction to the catalogue of Stubbs’ solo exhibition in 2010, what brings a ‘particular charge’ to these paintings:

The paintings propose a decorative excess. It’s excessive in its overload of visual detail, of information, also of styles of information (the complexity of the ‘eco-systems’), and in that there are evidently so many layers of paint. But then every component part of the elaborated performance turns out itself to be excessive. The borrowed graphics are in themselves ornate and excessive ... It has to do also with a baroque attitude to the era of the world wide web, in which digitally encoded images are exchanged as readily as any other coded symbols. The paintings dwell in this networked superabundance. 

Places

Subjects

abstract

Materials & Techniques

MDF, floor varnish, household paint, painting (as object name), tinted

Artist

Michael Stubbs (1961 - )

Title

Fireeye Elevator

Date

2010

Medium

Household paint and tinted floor varnish on MDF

Dimensions

height: 152.30 cm, width: 121.20 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Laurent Delaye, July 2010

Inscription

signed, dated and inscribed verso tl

Provenance

Laurent Delaye, London

GAC number

18339