Literature

Durham Press has collaborated with James Nares on a series titled Road Paint Prints. The nine intaglio prints achieve a visual effect similar to his recent Road Paint series of paintings.

For his Road Paint series, Nares brought a road striping machine into his studio. These tools are typically used to create solid dividing lines, dashes, and other traffic indicators on pavement, but Nares walked his machine across large canvases to make gestural marks with thermoplastic paint, often adding glass beads to give the works a textural and reflective quality. These towering paintings—most are 10 by 8 feet—were the subject of a 2013 exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Utilizing the same machine on site at Durham Press, the Road Paint Prints began by creating these distinct lines on melamine. The raised lines were used to make a casting into a polyurethane mold—the ink could then be hand applied into the crevasses of the mold and printed with an intaglio technique over a black screenprinted background.

The Road Paint Prints feature a similar gestural quality and texture as the paintings but are a much more intimate in scale. Each work in the series focuses on a solitary line and emphasizes subtle variations within seemingly repetitive and automatic imagery. This focus on individual marks recalls the artists signature works with isolated brushstroke images on monochromatic backgrounds. The prints also expand on many of his other recent investigations into momentum and suspended action. Like his “high speed drawings,” for which the artist drew on paper while it spun on a motorized, lathe-like machine, or his film Street, which was created with a high-speed camera and presented in ultra slow motion, Nares’ Road Paint Prints explore the perception of movement and velocity. The series takes the anonymous lines that one passes by mindlessly on the highway and instead renders them personal through deceleration.

Road Paint Prints, an edition of 12, and other works by James Nares are available directly through Durham Press. For pricing and other information please contact us at sales@durhampress.com.