Andy Collins

Even though I like to think that I have an eye for abstract minimalism, I feel completely dwarfed in comparison to artists who painstakingly formulate their work to take on a deceivingly simple and straightforward aesthetic. Andy Collins is one such artist.

Andy Collins’s paintings are lusciously synthetic. Cold and glossy, his large pastel canvases are suffocating vacuums of glamour. Working from fashion photos, Collins’s abstracted forms are derived from the overlooked in-between spaces of supermodel spreads. Folds in fabric, creases in elbows, knees and armpits become a pattern of fetishised contemplation. Their contours are retraced and suggested forms are embellished, creating ethereal motifs that are both organic and electrifying. Collins’s process is one of almost perverse fixation. Taking several months to complete a painting, he painstakingly constructs his airless forms entirely by hand, leaving no trace of brushwork.

Reducing recognisable forms to their barest essentials, Andy Collins’s [work] is neither abstract nor figurative; but rather hosts a supernatural quality of inbetween-ness, an embodiment of aura and retention. Collins uses this subliminality as a departure point for mystical experience. Fixating on the suggested contours of forms, he slips between these cracks, physically exploring the workings of his image from inside-out; caressing its creases, savouring the possibilities of their imagined space. Through his intensive process of painting, Collins addresses the links between physicality and memory, the frailties of perception lifts into an expansive field of wonder and entrancement.

Andy Collins develops his forms from the sensuous suggestion of magazine layouts: tracing the gaps created by necklines, folded knees and flirtatious ripples in fabric. His paintings reproduce the sexual frisson of glimpsing up a skirt, the electric fixation of imagining what lies beneath. Through his intensive painting process, Collins’s titillating forms melt into mesmerising abstractions. Contemplation of negative space takes metaphysical form, a knowledge gained not only from seeing, but experiencing silky textures and promising depths. Through the physicality of making, Collins’s figurative subjects are expressed in abstract fields, as synthetic and emotionally distant as his sources. (Saatchi Gallery)