DrSimon Roffey-Harris

In my practice orientated PhD, which centred on painting, the cinematic and a re-negotiation of formalist modes of painting practice through an exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical processes. Specifically, how their philosophical relationship to the virtual could inform each other towards a concept of the painted picture plane that acknowledged both surface and pictorial depth. A central premise of the research both theoretically and practically, as a studio investigation, explored the potential of the internal pictorial plane becoming a virtual, complex and a plural space with a duration more akin to celluloid and the cinematic. Giles Deleuze’s concept of ‘‘the fold’ and ‘duration’ were at the core of the research and provided a method to re-think the established Renaissance, Modernist and Post-Modernist pictorial planes. The research discussed my own studio practice as it explored these concepts.

My continued research is has taken the relationship between the photographic darkroom as a point of the abstracted event for painting. It is at this point of nexus that the distinct relationship between painting, photography and ‘the virtual’ can be presented. In effect how, an understanding of the virtual can be employed as a mode of post-digital semblance (representation). The role of the virtual becomes a key concept in understanding how as a mode of visual semblance as a constructed illusion becomes pictorially abstract through the advent of the post-digital.