W Projects is pleased to present What Matters, Jane Grocott’s first solo exhibition. Developed over the past year in New York, this body of work takes up the notion of matter simultaneously as substance, as problem, as subject, as significance. Working between the limits of material and the immensity of meaning, painting for her is a way to investigate what matters—as a question and statement of fact—from monumental to minute scales.

Each painting has its own self-sustaining internal logic; in these isolated ecosystems, matter is frozen in transformation. Shapes emerge through the muddling of figure and ground where negative and positive space compete to advance and recede toward the viewer. Between expansive depths and flattened surfaces, forms hover suspended between states of being. Grocott uses shadow as a tool to suggest a form's position on the picture plane rather than to assert objects in space. She is interested in falsity, staging and then dismantling illusions, and capturing the idea of something rather than depicting the real thing. Her colours lean towards high chroma, at times fluorescent hues that have a distinctly synthetic feel, much like colours found in advertisements or projected through a screen.

Grocott works from images taken while in transit through the city. Drawn to repetition, oddity, and unexpected colour, she seeks shapes and patterns in shadows cast by city infrastructure, sidewalk detritus, graffiti, and other urban evidence. These images serve as points of departure: a way to initiate a structure within the painting that she can build from or break down. She uses abstraction as a process of deconstructing and reconstructing imagery: making the familiar unfamiliar, disorienting to find new orientation, or fragmenting direct experience into fictitious recollections.

With canvas, Grocott is trying to access the tactual feeling of paper and the immediacy of collage. She uses scissors as her drawing tool, creating hard edged forms with a cut line. She superimposes these shapes on the canvas, using them as a form of additive redaction—at once incorporating new information while at the same time masking the initial ground from view. At times, she employs layers of transparent coloured vinyl sheets that mimic a painted glaze and create a consistent veil over areas of the surface. Grocott works on multiple canvases at once at a frenetic pace, outrunning her pragmatic rational tendencies, thereby allowing for improvisation and permitting her impulses to govern her decision making.

Her paintings are driven by haphazard spontaneity, by an impulse to see and an urgency to set the surface into motion. What begins to hold meaning is the connective tissue that forms in the making of a painting; where external influences merge with internal beliefs, patterns of observation, conditions of the psyche, and rhythms of the body. In trusting that a mark on the canvas is both trivial and consequential, each subsequent gesture proves the point of the one it follows—but also has the ability to dismantle any fixed logic that begins to form, leaving the paintings open to ever-evolving states of flux. Within this fluctuation, she is honing a sensibility that allows her to interpret matter as it comes into and fades from being.