‘Cluster Globular’

September 2021



 Richard Ducker and Derek Ogbourne

In an age of high anxiety, punctured by episodes of boredom, uncertainty reins.  In response to lockdown Richard Ducker and Derek Ogbourne took their art back to basics. Like prisoners in solitary confinement, independently of each other, they looked to find meaning through the most simple of mark making processes with oil paint and ink. With minimal means they ask what art can be when made in confinement. Can it refer to anything beyond its own creative act? Can it have purpose? 

Derek Ogbourne’s paintings are all played out over the same unforgiving, flat, neutral grey ground. On this constant, minimal surface each work is a unique arrangement and assortment of elemental gestures in thick paint. One is immediately aware of its physical presence, of how the paint has been worked, dolloped, moved and dragged.

This is a lexicon of abstract gestural painting is presented as calligraphic, illegible signs that float on the surface of the canvas. They are sometimes figurative without form – figures and animal parts that have yet to find their configuration in space – and at other times no more than gestures awaiting interpretation. 

Richard Ducker’s ink laden works can be seen as islands with valleys and plateaus and inlets cut out of imaginary maps, samples of damaged, imperfect forms, archaeological relics pinned and preserved as multiverses of automatism.

Clusters of discarded slivers of flesh, specks of dust, human in origin are made massive, stellar debris born of the swift harnessing of the inks’ fluid fascination for shape shifting. Like the alchemist who transforms base materials into the treasure of precious infinite light filled form, these self contained worlds with their lunar absence of pigmentation float in cold white skies and provide us with a Rorschach-like test for us to interpret as we wish. 

www.richardducker.com / www.derekogbourne.net