Small oil painting by James Cabaniuk. Tick red, blue, and purple paint lathered on the canvas with tear drop shapes outlined within it. 

The smaller works are exercises in the fludity of the motifs. Cropped to see where recognisable gestures loose their purpose or gain another one because I do love a double entendre. The crops are also a focus of the subject. Little snapshots of intimate moments. I mainly work on a big scale because I like the idea of the paintings becoming architectural objects, changing or effecting the space they are in. Unavoidable objects with an agenda. I've been thinking about the smaller works as ways of placing these agendas in a domestic setting and what it means to try and put a politicised current into an object, scenario and cannon that doesn't necessarily support it. Sneaking in to peoples kitchens to shout.

There is a recurring motif of tears and hearts in the work which are a metric for how sad or happy the anecdotes in each painting are. Sometimes they morph in to each other and into other things.

The layering is part archeological archive, part tool of queer opacity. The layers are a barrier of choice to choose who to tell the stories to. The forms are clear but obscured, blatant but only when you have the map key (it's usually a bum hole). Each layer is an edit or correction from the next. The paintings get painted over when the anecdote has lost its relevancy in terms of the journey of making the work. A bit like when you come back from holiday and it's really fun to say what happened and after a while you feel like you're just repeating the story and it looses it's fun.

crop of b chehayeb's painting 'jncos at the quinceanera' a large red abstract painting 

Exhibition Feature Image

installation images of 'and in and out of weeks' at Workplace | London by Tom Carter

James Cabaniuk

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James Cabaniuk

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London

Newcastle