These are paintings for the drag ‘n’ drop era, a time in which the image is endlessly mobile, and endlessly adaptable. Zooms seem important, here, as do crops and rotations. Describing them, we might reach for the vocabulary of propriety software: Photoshop terms such as ‘eyedropper’, or ‘layer mask’. And yet, Mary Ramsden’s paintings belong obdurately to the world of objects. Executed on canvas, but also on denim, board, and tilted oblongs of aluminium, they appear to be unwilling to give themselves up to purely digital consumption. In an age of scroll and swipe, of capture and copy, there remains something fugitive about these works. Forms overlay each other, like windows open on a laptop screen, and pigment spills over the lip of the picture plane, where it collects in the neglected edge zones of the canvas, underscoring the physicality of the painted image, and the business of taking it in. Sometimes, whole compositions – whole works – are swaddled in a fresh bolt of fabric, bearing marks that might hint, or not, at the hidden motif beneath. Is this an index of painterly doubt, or something more playful: a meditation on where, exactly, a painting starts, and stops?

Ramsden’s titles are, it seems to me, instructive. While a number of them suggest digital procedures, they also suggest analogue relationships: Attachment to a lover, Back Up in a sticky situation, Face Time with one’s friends. Others appear to be statements of affirmation – Nice One, The Business, Stay Gold, Way to Go – or else speak of physical intimacy, and its opposite. These works are sometimes Licked, and sometimes Untouched. The artist has spoken of the importance of her paintings feeling ‘handled’. We get to thinking of the pristine surfaces of smartphones and tablets (those hosts, and propagators, of images), and the way in which their perfection is compromised by a single smear of finger grease. Ramsden’s works are more resilient to human interaction. Evidence of her hand is everywhere – even the ‘flat’ quadrilaterals of pigment that appear in many of her works are striated with crisscrossing brush marks, their tiny furrows funneling, then rerouting, waves of ambient light.

Often installed in constellations, or tight little pairs, Ramsden’s paintings revel in their family resemblance, the notion that they are ‘cut from the same cloth’. When two or more of her works are displayed together, they seem to activate the space between them, the white expanse of the gallery wall transforming from a void into a compositional element, the site of visual experience. We might imagine her painterly gestures extending beyond the periphery of the support, and out into the world beyond, contaminating it with their energy, as though a given rectangle of fabric, or board, or metal were not the container of these marks, these humming colours, only a surface on which they happened to momentarily land. Ramsden has said that in this pixel-glutted century, she wants to make ‘something that might stick’. Her paintings are a place where images become specific, pledged to their own being. Even here though, they remain restless, always ready to slip out of sight.

Pilar Corrias
Independent Projects
New York
6 – 15 November 2014

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