Richard Graville is a British artist. His paintings, executed using a mixture of matt and high gloss paints, depict abstract forms infused with emphatic, sign-like qualities. He has developed his oeuvre by analysing the secret codes of animal colouration. The paintings combine strategies animals use to warn and deceive their adversaries while simultaneously seducing a mate. He isolates these codes to meditate on how our feelings of the sublime arise from our biological roots.
text by Phillip Hawker
‘Upon first encountering Richard’s paintings, I interpreted their simple geometry as anchored in minimalist art’s familiar look. However, such an impulsive assumption led me into a cognitive bias trap contained within the paintings. The sleek, cool look of 20th-century minimal painting captures the viewer’s attention, thus becoming unknowingly hijacked and bewitched by the effects of the underlying codes and content of their biological origin. It was a surprise that such inorganic, almost machine-made paintings could have, as a source, the stories, behaviours, and impulses of zoological survival codes honed by natural selection. These survivalist species tactics, including the human, become the condensed source for the paintings, determining scale, colour and paint finish. In human society, we utilise these colour combinations to make crude signs that protect us in dangerous situations. The paintings use the same colours and formats as these signs.
Prolonged looking also plays a vital role in the process Richard intends to solicit. Limiting colour and gestural detail allows the painting to ‘operate’, encouraging the viewer to spend time exploring its surface. Subtle changes in surface sheen and colour density summon deep primal reactions within us that are so involuntary we hardly register them. They explore the space where our visual sense starts to break down, and we glimpse what we call ‘mystery’. As Richard explains, “My job is to strip everything else away so that I can illuminate what underpins our perceptions. Although I mimic aspects of formalist painting, I don’t share the same concerns. My paintings are diagrammatic, not abstract. I use geometry to maintain focus. My paintings use codes that would exist without humans.”
This focus provokes preconscious reactions in the viewer, triggering thoughts, feelings, or memories that dwell beneath the surface. Deeper still is the evolutionary hard-wiring of codes vital to species survival. Primal signals developed within the animal kingdom over millions of years are simplified and organised, permitting just enough information to present their purpose for being. Using this de-cluttering process, the paintings become blueprints that explore how nature works and NOT how it looks through a romanticised lens.
“I combine two essential principles: aposematism (advertising dangerous aspects) and cryptic (concealment) colouration. I make a direct presentation of these principles. I use aposematism to gain your attention. I use cryptic strategies to make other aspects of the painting strange and less legible. On a perceptual level, you must work slightly harder and have less certainty. You have to participate. In that way, I utilise these codes to capture attention AND imagination.”
Richard sidesteps historical theories of abstraction, rejecting claims of theosophical universality. Instead, he considers these codes and protocols as signs relevant to our biological niche. The paintings act as attention-seeking devices that manipulate these codes into seducing, warning or deceiving ‘machines’. Emotions are an alert system - to either move closer to or avoid something. For myself, being with the paintings provokes unexpected feelings; malevolence, threat, virility and beauty.
Engaging with Richard’s paintings, especially for some time, allows them to throw switches in the mind. Initially disguised behind a minimalist smokescreen, feelings are activated as they seductively pulsate and perplex. Artificial creatures staking their claim to exist.’