David Batchelor

David Batchelor makes sculptural installations from objects found in the streets of London, hollowed, stacked and given a new life as empty but brightly coloured light boxes or as unlit composites. Consistent throughout his works is the lurking familiarity of the material leftovers of modern life, from factory scrap to disused or broken domestic items, re-purposed into hypnotic, beautifully patterned objects presenting a distillation of colour’s presence in our everyday environment. “When I make works from light boxes (such as Brick Lane Remix, 2003), or old plastic bottles with lights inside, I hope the illumination suspends their objecthood to some degree and makes the viewer see them a little differently – see them as colours before seeing them as objects.” The brightest possible palette fills the range of neon-lit columns, modular crates, spherical shapes, and unlit clusters (such as Parapillar, 2006), the artist’s “vehicles for colour.”

Batchelor is interested in reconsidering colour theories from a contemporary context, which he explores in Chromophobia (2000), a book dedicated to the subject. His dazzlingly saturated objects reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. “I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in ‘pure’ colour or in colour as a transcendental presence… So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence.”