Brian Dupont

Transcript Paintings

The Transcript paintings were inspired by Richard Prince’s testimony to the New York circuit court regarding his Canal Zone paintings and the transcript of his testimony originally compiled and published by Greg Allen. I was struck by the serendipity that the entire transcript took six videotapes to record, and that I happened to have six blank aluminum panels leaning against the studio wall.

Working from pages in the text where the videographer speaks, I settled on six main paintings where he interrupts the proceedings to note the tape change and added two addendum paintings to cover other interjections.  I started by writing out passages with a marker and then building the composition out of the layers of stenciled letterforms and the shapes the text blocks delineated. Through repeated erasure and revision the composition evolved to a point where the text, while legible, functions as an aesthetic element in the painting, rather than something to merely read. The goal is a painting that utilizes appropriated text to function as a fully realized abstraction.