ABOUT

b.1973 London, England
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Education / MA Fine Art (Hons) 1991-97 University of Edinburgh

In Sam Lock’s research, the very use of painting, materials and the artist’s approach to the creative act, challenge previous conventions. The image through gesture is abstract - and the artist’s gesture, far from being a simple action or the simple recording of facts, actions, geographic and temporal contexts with mere documentary intent, now moves – as the artist says:

"in the liminal spaces in-between, finding and losing at the same time, being present and absent, being author and non-author, reasoning and imagining, constructing and deconstructing, finding solace in the shared mystery and anticipation of roads that lead nowhere and everywhere"

in a dualism that returns a totalizing image of outer and inner reality at the same time. Sam Lock’s analysis draws inspiration from the works of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, two of the most prominent playwrights of the 20th century. "Under what is said, something else is said" said Pinter, and the ideas implied in this observation, which include concepts of double meanings, loss, discovery, and the overlap of the past and present, are critical to understanding Lock's entire body of work. A "narrative" that, now devoiding diegetic intent, intends to abandon the very foundations of the transmission of a concept only through language (as the word itself is overcharged with meanings), in order to arrive through the “sight” at a "speaking silence" that resonates through a play of presences and absences - which ultimately, simply and poetically, tells and "stages" almost as in theater, the story of our existence in the world as human beings.

WORDS: Alice Zucca 2022