David Cyrus Smith
b. 1972, St. Albans
2013-2015 MPhil Painting, Royal College of Art, London
1996-1999 PGDip Painting, Royal Academy Schools, London
1992-1995 BA Painting, Wimbledon School of Art, London
Recent Exhibitions
Group shows:
2014 ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014’, World Museum, Liverpool, ICA, London, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Penzance
2014 ‘Tender Buttons’, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London
2012 ‘Roma III’, APT Gallery, London 2011 ‘Social Space’, Fort Gallery, London
2010 ‘Meet me at the cemetery gates’, British School at Rome, Rome
2009 ‘Instants et Glissements’, La Box, école nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges, Bourges
Awards and Residencies:
2006-2011 The Sugar House Award, Acme Studios, London
2010 Abbey Fellowship in Painting, British School at Rome, Rome
Artist’s Statement
Commenting on the use and significance of objects in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writing, Roland Barthes observed ‘The whole purpose of the authors work, in fact is to confer upon an object its ‘being there’, to keep it from being ‘something’ . A certain mobility of thinking results when this resistance is applied and what is revealed is something, which is always deferred, not quite present. The ‘placeless’ places, which Robbe-Grillet establishes, suggest new conditions of alertness and a relationship to attention. This is time becoming space, and space becoming time; it is an undoing of the desire to name and to know.
My intention is for the work to produce an optical experience through painting that is the combination of the formality of the paintings rendering and the process of its making. This allows me to generate instability that encourages a play between denial and comprehension of image. Through this there is the potential for a spatial dialectic to evolve, where a work functions as both immediate source for an embodied experience and as a sign and symptom to be decoded. This is developed through the doubling, mirroring, layering and decomposition of pattern in both its appearance and implied manifestations.