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The works of art which fascinate me most often are those whose very presence disrupts the emotional covenants we form daily with the everyday world, as a means to its comfortable navigation. These works are rarely demonstrative, but rather possess the sense of being reluctant inhabitants of the material world. Emissaries from elsewhere, they place pressure upon the means by which we construct, partake of, and understand our daily lives. As attempts to make sense of the world they are small acts of courage.
Peter Maloney speaks of his work as a conversation with mortality. His work, in part, responds to experiences of pain and grief resulting from the impact of HIV and AIDS. It is partly therapeutic and restorative. But this is not its only motivating factor. It possesses a complex social grounding, along with, but not contrary to, an often mysterious intangibility of reference and intent which results from its conjunctions of photographic representation, painterly abstraction, calligraphic marking and text.
Over the past decade Maloney has made many large abstract paintings featuring gestural markings suggestive of an almost private language. These paintings prioritise the visual over the semantic in their relationship to language. More fundamentally, they project the failure and inadequacies of language in the face of the artist's experiences of personal loss.
Maloney began to make photographic pieces during the mid -1990s, generally working with paired images which were marked with text. The juxtaposition of strange fragments, both visual and textual, whether personal to (or created by) the artist or found in the public domain, rehearses the suppressed poetry of his earlier paintings. But photography offers a clarity of association, with loss, memorial, memory and desire, which