Bike

Coming from an artist perpetually interested in the connections (and collapse) between painting, photography and sculpture, Damian Moppett’s Bike is a free-standing painting that use a bracket to be displayed. The support is cut to fit the image exactly, with almost no background visible aside from the negative space between the spokes of the bicycle wheels. There is a short, third dimension of approximately 2 cm, which requires the additional support in order to show the bright white verso of the work.

The process of this body of work saw the artist first capturing the objects on his phone, random snapshots of his everyday domestic life. The images were then cropped, eliminating most of the negative space, which Moppett then translated to paintings on thick, white aluminum, which had been precisely cut to the photographic image. The orange bicycle has a deep perspective and magically remains erect without a rider or a kickstand. 

It is particularly striking when the viewer moves around the installed work, with the painted image distorting and disappearing, revealing the white shapes of the cropped positive space. The idea of traditional perspective is distorted, first by the distortion of the artist’s camera lens and then again by the lack of adjacent visual information – the viewer doesn’t know what has been left out, or cropped, from the original photograph.