Corporate Art Rentals’ artist, Ian Wells is exhibiting his work at the Five Walls Projects gallery in Footscray.
In Ian Wells’ paintings, allusions to tabs, folds and slots and the deliberate misuse of the symbols of cardboard packaging, tease our sense of recall with recognisable forms.
The resultant paintings contain an array of odd and unlikely shapes. Forms are intersected by creases, cut lines and separate panels, interrupting our attention to the bigger picture. Images appear within the paintings, indirectly referencing little-known and indistinguishable forms that exist in industry and consumable products. In the interstitial passages of painting, the viewer is left to recognise and make sense of elements that skirt the boundary of recollection. The viewer’s perceptual re-ordering and ‘filling in’ of these disregarded and frequently discarded forms is an attempt to make sense in an undetermined environment, neither new nor old; an uncomfortable, difficult third.”
