ANDY COLLINS (AMERICAN B. 1971)
Untitled
2001
signed and dated ANDY COLLINS 2001 (on the reverse)
oil and alkyd on canvas
127 x 134.5cm

Provenance:
Irena Hochman Fine Art Ltd, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner, 2005

Exhibition History:
Abstract America: New Painting And Sculpture, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2009

Literature:
Abstract America: New Painting And Sculpture, exh. Cat. Saatchi Gallery, London, 2009,
pp.11 (illustrated in colour)

Andy Collins’s paintings are lusciously synthetic. Cold and glossy, his large pastel canvases are suffocating vacuums of glamour. Working from fashion photos, Collins’s abstracted forms are derived from the overlooked in-between spaces of supermodel spreads. Folds in fabric, creases in elbows, knees and armpits become a pattern of fetishised contemplation. Their contours are retraced and suggested forms are embellished, creating ethereal motifs that are both organic and electrifying. Collins’s process is one of almost perverse fixation. Taking several months to complete a painting, he painstakingly constructs his airless forms entirely by hand, leaving no trace of brushwork. In Untitled, his biomorphic composition, a sublime vacuous beauty, mesmerises both seduction and emptiness.

Andy Collins’s paintings glow with a transcendental eroticism, bringing about a heightened state of awareness where physical sensuality courts cerebral enlightenment. Inspired by the prurience of fashion adverts, Untitled’s composition construes desire’s lingering remains as a Rorschach-like distortion; a mandala of allurement and absence. Collins conceives overwhelming sensation as an intangible void; his paintings resonate with a voyeuristic proclivity. Equally intimate and distant, his obsessive process (of up to 30 layers of seamless application) infuses his smooth surface with a slick confidence.

Andy Collins’s paintings manufacture a hermetically sealed aesthetic, offering a deceptive brand of pop. In Untitled, benign-toned colour fields sit with antiseptic perfection, their plastic forms fade in and out of soft-porn focus, pulsating from the contoured motif. In hand-rendering the trappings of superficial attraction, Collins serves up clinical beauty with a fine strategic awareness. Fluctuating between the mechanical and biological, Collins evokes an unsettling hybrid: a calculating and corporate detachment born of the most intimate sentiment.

Andy Collins's paintings are models of visual perfection. Approaching painting with a minimalist's fetishism, Collins hones his canvases to the simplest and boldest statements to capitalise on the power of suggested form. Working from photos, Andy Collins removes the subject, focussing instead on the evocative possibility of implied image. His abstracted patterns retain the essence of their original picture, and extrapolate a more complex interpretation, provoking emotional and spiritual reactions to qualities of surface, colour and composition. In Untitled, Andy Collins presents a pattern of mesmerising consonance. His biomorphic form insinuates bodily tactility; through clinical rendering, Andy Collins elevates these connotations to a metaphysical plane, creating a sensuality that's idealistic and conceptually pure.

Combining both the spiritualism of abstract painting with the sublime numbness of mass media reproduction, Andy Collins infuses Untitled with a divine aura. Reminiscent of religious painting, Collins’s blues and golds evaporate into halos of blinding white radiance. Space becomes the focus of Collins’s painting. Suggestive of a topographical map, his forms waver with entropic energy, condensing and expanding in their abstracted plane.

Andy Collins’s abstract paintings flirt between the intellect of formalist perfection and the frivolity of high-gloss design. In Untitled, Collins’s jagged pattern tears through his canvas with cartoon violence, suggestive of teeth, geological landscapes or seismological graphs. Effusing his form with a toxic glow, Collins subtly shifts the concentrated flatness of his image to a dynamic element of intrigue. His seamless brushwork renders this painting flawless. This controlled craftsmanship adds depth to the generic aesthetic of mass production.

Andy Collins develops his forms from the sensuous suggestion of magazine layouts: tracing the gaps created by necklines, folded knees and flirtatious ripples in fabric. His paintings reproduce the sexual frisson of glimpsing up a skirt, the electric fixation of imagining what lies beneath. Through his intensive painting process, Collins's titillating forms melt into mesmerising abstractions. Contemplation of negative space takes metaphysical form, a knowledge gained not only from seeing, but experiencing silky textures and promising depths. Through the physicality of making, Collins’s figurative subjects are expressed in abstract fields, as synthetic and emotionally distant as his sources.