Description

This work is from Edward Renouf’s Infïnites series in which he used what he referred to as “sgraffïto,” a technique of scratching minute scribbles through wet black oil paint with a pin point, revealing tiny traces of the gray acrylic beneath. Emanating from his long fascination with “the aleatory richness of random, often messy, and evidently impulsive quick lines” in Rembrandt’s drawings, Renouf’s planes of tiny jittery gestures culminate as “abstract drawings of a calligraphy that represent nothing but itself.” Renouf has stated: “Philosophically, my INFINITES are an emphatic statement of the unitary nature of existence.” Intensely aware of the Far East’s “aesthetic and intuitive genius and the so convincingly rational philosophical religions,” Renouf approached painting as object and image at once, seeking “the holistic grasp of existential unity” and “paradox without which no profound understanding is possible.”