Vilma Gold presents Finish your sentence, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Nicholas Byrne.

The show will consist of three cycles of new paintings started whilst Byrne participated on the IMMA residency in Dublin last year. Evolving from automatic drawing processes and the repetition that it incurs, for example, through concepts such as muscle-memory, a series of bisecting pattern-like paintings on gesso panels alternate between the acutely chromatic and the monochrome. A new triptych on copper shifts the emphasis from graphic line to more exploded, high-key, saturated colour. Two large-scale multi-paneled pieces on linen see how a number of looser grounds might be held by the overlaying of a large graphic image in this instance sourced from works by Boris Bucan and Raoul Dufy.

Recalling the conventions of icon painting, Byrne’s paintings become a means by which to rehearse their own process of objectification. His previous works have often found their rendering around a graphic figure such as the silhouette of a hieroglyph-like head or a letter of the alphabet. It seems that the labor going into producing a work, particularly its corporeal aspect of direct contact and intervention, goes hand in hand with the idea that a figure would be visualized at the end of the process to address it. Allusions to grammar, and the grammar of painting, are developed here in terms of process. Lines starting and dropping away before finishing, Byrne’s paintings become a series of persistent generators substituting resolve with an insistence on anticipation and regeneration.