Overview:
The Toxic Sublime series are distorted, three-dimensional 'landscapes' that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They begin with an inherently contradictory artistic process whereby Quinn submits a photograph printed on canvas of a sublime sunrise over a beach to a process of disintegration, alteration and decay. The canvas is spray painted, sanded, bent and folded during which process the artist takes the canvases out onto the streets of London where, using a sanding machine, detritus from the street such as chains, nails or man hole covers related to water in the city are ground into the painted canvas, leaving a ghostly outline of their forms in the composition. Quinn finally bonds the landscapes to a sheet of aluminium, which he then bends, kicks and twists, creating hybrid objects that retain the striking, formal elements of classical landscape painting but with the resonance of something wrecked, like a discarded remnant from some kind of physical disaster. Moreover, while all the works originate from the same iconic image of an orange tinted tropical beach, they emerge from this process as inherently individual, retaining their own particular traces of their physical, material manipulation.
