Aaron Rigal is an artist and multidisciplinary creative based in London. Having studied Foundation diploma at Kingston School of Art he went on to study Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art.
Aaron Rigal’s work as a painter is firmly based in the materiality of creation with the conception of his work happening subconsciously, as such his process is focused on translation, destruction and reformation. Rigal’s practice is informed by the innate suggestive nature of colour, particularly in relation to archetypal imagery resurfacing across cultures and historical timelines. He is particularly drawn to the ‘intermediate and unstable’ as outlined in James Hillman’s Alchemical Blue, a paradoxical, ambiguous place not confined by the linear processes laid out in traditional Jungian Psychology. As such the paintings explore thresholds between the symbolic and representative. Layers are scraped, burned and rubbed away, the nebulous marks leaving behind a compositional seed can be delineated, from which the rest of the painting emerges. This process is reflective of the way political narratives and ideologies are consumed in an increasingly polarised and technologically reliant society, one in which objective truth is expeditiously replaced by the individualised experience of the information we consume.
Painting is the means by which I navigate thought and process memories. Within the paintings a number of references, both physical and subliminal tangle on the canvas to create a pareidolic web of potential. Ostensibly these surfaces are purely abstract, but when the mind is allowed to associate by similarity they become meaningful with figurative traits. My role as the painter is to guide these gestures of chance while still allowing the viewer to be agentic. In a way the creation of the paintings is a constant between the medium and overindulgence in personal connotations, making the familiar unfamiliar.
‘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)