Made deliberately and slowly, often over several years, James Collins employs additive means to excavate shapes and forms that emerge from within and beneath, as if always there. In his meticulous, densely layered paintings, gradual accretions of oil are built into mounds, furrows, and channels, becoming topographical sites of intense colour.
Deep, pearlescent beetle-black blues withhold and reflect light, whilst seemingly earthen browns - on closer inspection - emit spectral patchworks of luminescence. For Collins, paint is alchemical. In the laboratory of his Darlington studio in Northern England, pigment and medium are mixed and melded to create impossibly chromatic hues that shift constantly with the changing light, and as one moves around them.
Challenging the idea of painting as pictorial space, Collins insists on the paradoxical nature of painting both as surface and as event. As objects, his paintings resist narrative and interpretation, remaining absolute in their immediacy, confronting the viewer with the fact of their materiality. Simultaneously, his paintings require the viewer to succumb to spatial and temporal dislocation - to be transported by, and with, each painting – as if through the unknowable reaches of deep time: through epochs, civilisations, and evolution. Through singular, glacial intent, Collins reveals foundational, archetypal forms, primordial signifiers of the great arc of existence.
James Collins (b. 1992, Darlington, UK) lives and work in Darlington, UK.
Collins received his MA from the Royal College of Art (2017) and his BA from Wimbledon College of Art (2015). Selected solo exhibitions include New Paintings, Encounter in collaboration with Painters Painting Paintings, Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Penumbra, Claas Reiss, London, UK (2021); and Occulation, Car Drde, Bologna, Italy (2021). Group exhibitions include Once, Then, Gone, Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2023); The Reason for Painting, with The Art Riot Collective, Mead Gallery, Warwick Art Centre, UK (2023); Alte Freunde, neue Freunde, Claas Reiss, London, UK (2021); and Abstract with Figure, James Fuentes, New York, US (2020). His work is included in international private collections.
