Compress
Compress, 2006/7 (L) & 2005 (R)
works on paper drawn under the pressure of erasing other images, then corrected
ink, correction fluid, magazine paper and pins
each approximately 31 x 21 cm
courtesy of the artist
Compress
This ongoing series (2001+) of works-on-paper are 'drawn' under the pressure of erasing other images. In effect, an image-trace has been pressed from one magazine page onto an adjacent page, which has then had its information 'whited-out' with correction fluid. Reductive and visually tenuous, the Compress works appear as overexposed pages stained with barely-visible bodies or figure-couplings. They are presented very simply, pinned to the wall.
As part of the NEW07 exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2007) a room of these works, subtitled 'the pit of doublivores', was presented, together with a specially installed fluorescent lighting system. Earlier bodies of these works were shown as part of Insufferable Nebulae and other couplings (solo - Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, 2004) and, more recently, a smaller group of six, subtitled the 'brown study', formed part of my contribution to The body. The ruin exhibition (group - Ian Potter Museum of Art, 2005/6).
Links to Compress pages on the website:
Insufferable Nebulae and other couplings
Compress (pit of doublivores), 2006/7
works on paper drawn under the pressure of erasing other images, then corrected
ink, correction fluid, magazine paper and pins
approximately 31 x 21 cm
private collection, Sydney
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WRITINGS
What's important: forty laps back and forth at the Fitzroy swimming pool every other day to stem the headaches that come from the gut, the ones you can taste; clearing pages; the heat of the eraser; hard caressing of bodies into the page; their lambent glow; the alluring feel of classy magazine paper, crisp, while it lasts; a chemical whiteness covering things; the cast-off rubber and ink page-pile residue.
Christian Capurro, excerpt from NEW07 Interviewed
(Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Arts & Culture vol. 36 #1, February 2007)
OTHER WRITINGS
Christian Capurro's 'Compress' works (2005) are delicate traces of gesture, impressions of a body's presence and movement through space. [They are literally the result of the pressure of a hand erasing an image from another page;] they are like the ink blotter, the page that sits behind another, quietly recording, bearing witness to the action taking place elsewhere. Gesture and the potential for the expressive qualities of gesture are translated into a secondary medium in Capurro's work, which operates as a kind of trace of gesture. In this way his work often exists between image and anti-image - having a kind of iconoclastic potential to be read as an image but also to subsume the image within its related action. Capurro describes the 'Compress' works as the 'fastidious labouring of the body against the image'. The works operate through the tension between the presence of the body and absence of the image, and the action of the body. In this manner they could be seen as being an empirical form of evidence or measure of the body's movement, like the apparatus used by work place assessors to measure the labouring body.
Bridget Crone, excerpt from The ruined body?
('The body. The ruin' catalogue, 2005)