"Foreign Bodies" by Gerard Hemsworth

Foreign Bodies -- by Gerard Hemsworth

Generally the notion of a 'foreign body' refers to something, which is out of keeping with our expectations, something, which is out of place that should not be there, something, which is confrontational and interrupts order and our understanding of existing values.

Being confronted by something which is seemingly foreign can be a disabling experience, it can undermine our values as well as open doors which we may not wish to enter. This of course is fundamental to contemporary art practice. Perhaps the foreign is an essential element and necessary feature for critical engagement challenging our understanding of what art can be along with the values that we bring to the work.

Diego Singh's painting are full of 'foreign bodies', cleverly camouflaged, placed or even disguised within a variety of familiar styles and tropes, from abstraction and expressionism to figuration and process. However these appropriations, this layering within his work, this slippage that undermines and compromises readings that address image making in current painting, seem not only to serve as strategies in critiquing style but also to engage the viewer. His paintings initially tell the viewer what for the most part they already know and understand. It is this that enables them to engage, this is his strategy, as within the familiar lies the unfamiliar. Diego Singh is an artist who takes the viewer by the hand and then lets go.

Confronted by what we think we know and by what we don't know, what we are looking at and what we see and then what becomes apparent, what appears as valuable are the questions presented in his work. It is this 'appearance' that can be so disconcerting, this 'appearance' that enables us to sustain engagement, re-address our values and this 'appearance' that proposes a reflexive discourse. Diego Singh's painting not only asks the viewer to think in a different way, it makes a space for a different way of thinking. This is the 'foreign body' so easy to dismiss as an intrusion that now questions our values and demands  our attention. It is this engagement with the foreign that allows his paintings to be so intriguing and rewarding.

Essay from the monograph Diego Singh: Table for One, published by Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo and Old Hand, Miami, 2011.