Closer Still

“I’m always interested in cuts and inserts and the differences between continuous and contiguous surfaces, but this ramps things up. A fine-line frame is cut into the surrounding picture too causing gaps to open-up which both connect and sever the image. The almost bleached-out white light of the film, intensified by the wear of the tape and the copying from one format to another, is given its opposite in the black gaps caused by the cold steel frames. These micro-voids then are spaces where decades and instants become confused and where personal biographies are collapsed into other cultural histories. Just as the interval between the frames of a film are almost imperceptible, so lust, loss, joy and tragedy are unavoidable in the gap within and between this painting within a painting.”

Dan Howard-Birt, 2024

GROVE are pleased to present a new series of paintings by Graham Silveria Martin based on film stills featuring Al Parker in the Surge Studios production Turned On (1982). Re-staging a series of almost indistinguishable filmic frames that span a fraction of a second, each cropped, devoid of the context originally captured by the lens of director Steve Scott, Silveria Martin questions how time expands or contracts in these images. He invites us to consider how the tiniest of differences become amplified in repetition and, importantly, how desire maps onto both the passage of time and the minutiae of recognition.