William Monk’s latest series of paintings titled Point Datum plot a course across some vast and unknowable fictive landscape. What Monk eloquently describes as a “bounded arrangement,” is a set of parameters for connection; a series of fixed points made physical through applied paint. A series of determinants within a range of painterly options, from scale and tone to the meeting of colors that produce a line and a boundary. A “datum point,”—Monk’s inversion for the title suggests geography—refers to origin and destination, or rather in order to define a course or path one needs two points. For the artist, this recognizes not only the fictive space of the image but the space between images, between paintings and keenly between us the viewer and the painting. As he explains “The imagined painterly space is both abstract and figurative, and the literal space is equally so. Both are physical and metaphysical.” As, with music, it’s the space between the notes that allow for form, Monk’s paintings in their locked-off fixed camera perspective speak to location while teasing at the mystery of what sits beyond the border, between us and it.

Gallery address: 12/F, H Queen's, Queen's, Central