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"The Maya suite contains a series of forty-eight digital photographs. As pictorial theatre they represent pure action set against a ground that establishes the mood: the ochre tinge of Indian red has been cut with a touch of cadmium red - the prevailing colour. The ground is non-tactile, one cannot touch it in the imagination. It has the quality that Adrian Stokes, the distinguished English painter and writer on art, once described as film colour. By concentrating on one frame at a time, the colour-field envelops and draws you into its unlimited depths. This a quality Rothko employed on canvasses large enough to fill the entire visual field. The Rothko effect produces a strange feeling of absorption as you become cloaked in colour. The Progressions series works in the same way.
The ostensible subject: women walking down a staircase are rendered in a series of fleeting, diaphanous images. The pictorial problem of depicting movement in a stationary medium is as long as art itself. Sometimes it has been resolved serially, as in comic strips or in the marble reliefs of the Parthenon. Sometimes aspects of a moving figure have been superimposed one on another: a solution often favoured by the Assyrian sculptors, and indeed by Marcel Duchamps’ iconic monochrome image of the same subject Nude Decending a Staircase, No.2. Interestingly, Duchamps’ and Samper’s images are the inverse of each other. Duchamps’ painted Nude has it’s antecedent in the Maybridge’s photographs while Diego Samper’s photographic images have the painterly economy of a Francis Bacon."
Geoffrey Smedley
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