The Sleepers stepped down from the wall.

The Sleepers stepped down from the wall and joined the growing crowd. Their laughter was infectious, their revels intoxicating, their aim oblivion.

The Sleepers series, is a work in progress, a series of small oil paintings generating from a curious set of documentary photographs taken at Studio 54 in the late 1970s, and the associations they have to other current pre-occupations. The photographs show unconscious delirious party-goers sprawled on sofas and floors, key to them is one taken of a set of partygoers sitting against a wall which is painted with crude figures enacting a ‘disco’ Pastoral or Bacchanal. 

A simple process of applying oil paint to the images, by hand, was the way in, through the application of oil paint, these curious images disintegrate through the crude tactile process of finger painting. The photographic factual reveals itself as reverie, shifting and partial. 

Painting from or onto them, activates a process of displacement, first to another medium, and then to another register, it starts to undo them, pealing them from their surface, freeing them, or forcing an escape or shift into another register, framework, time. 

Insubstantial yet over-loaded with portent, placed in a tenuous chain of meanings … ideas of Bacchic delirium or psychosis, carnal and economic, are intertwined … perhaps it is under the weight of this expectation, they cannot hold, they start to disintegrate and dissolve, the figures to escape their confines. 

The tape used to fix the paper for one painting, becomes the subject matter for the next – pieces of used overlaid discarded tape a stand in for the limp bodies, suggesting the idea, or fact, of destruction in the creative process. 

The libidinal charge drives the seeker of pleasure, whether the pleasure is found in the party, the delirium, the painting, or the destruction, or its viewing.