Aaron Rigal (2000) is a London-based artists who’s work explores painting as a field of psychological and perceptual instability. Primarily working in oil, through layering, scraping, rubbing and revision Rigal builds gestural surfaces in which earlier stages remain visible. Within this process what appears is never entirely settled. Forms emerge through veils of colour, tonal compression and partially erased marks as though excavated from the surface rather than placed upon it. Each Painting records a sequence of buried decisions, hidden within these unsettled compositions we may discern faint traces of art historical motifs; fleeting suggestions of a wing, a bound form, a pastoral space or a bodily contour. Such references never appear as direct quotation, but linger more obliquely as atmosphere or painterly residue. What the viewer encounters is less a finished scene than a record of the unstable process of an image coming into view.
Aaron Rigal’s Paintings inhabit a space between figuration and abstraction, this is in part a visceral response to the medium itself, which Rigal sees as inherently ambiguous. In contrast to film or literature as an art form, paint drips - it smudges and smears - rendering it comparatively poor tool for clarification.
(Above words by Holly Braine for ‘Changing the Subject’ at Annely Juda)