Post-Dérive Painting

Dérive is a term coined by the French Situationists to describe the practice of wandering the city as a creative exercise. I first learned about it when participating in some experiments with the "lallaveestaabajoseñoracristina" performance art collective in Caracas, but continued to use the notion of re-tuning awareness to the city in my work as exemplified in the series "memoria fotogáfica" and a print commissioned by the Fundación Mercantil in Venezuela.

For this ongoing series of paintings, I've re-tooled the practice as the starting point for a coloured grid. The grid, which is generated using custom code and data collected in Dérive, becomes an art-historical linkage to the modern art legacies of Venezuela, a legacy that I have vivid attachments to, but that I have struggled to connect to as a maker. The process was devised as a series of steps to facilitate the act of painting and equate it to a series of translations (from walk to numbers, from code to grid, from reference to drawing) that require a degree of interpretation, including the approximation to the desired outcobe by painting exclusively from primary pigments or collage. All paintings are made on letter sized paper.