Marco Carofalo ART

As I plan how all the experiments and fragments, I accumulate will inform my final response I looked at the work of Liu Wei. I am mindful that I look to the work of painters and envisage how I may respond in print or incorporate the painterly elements into my work. This could be viewed as a weakness in my work, but I feel this is a positive stance to take as I treat my prints like paintings, creating one-off unique pieces of work. My position is that I am obscuring the medium of print and investigating what a print can be.
        Wei works in layers which is a mainstay of printmaking, especially screen printing which has a very painterly feel to the process. The squeegee acts much like a paint brush, under the influence of the user. The readymade is a recurring theme in Wei’s output, where he creates sculptures from found objects, such as ceramics, books, television sets, fridges, and fans. 
        China is known for its rapid growing economy and manufactures many of the products we use today. Wei works this into his practice, using the developing outside environment giving his work the feel of an urban landscape. This can be observed in the above abstracted images, with the thin vertical lengths filling-up the canvas. I also see the grid form which I am exploring in my work and interestingly Wei begins these paintings by forming them in Photoshop; they begin as digital renderings and are then executed physically. I can see this as a type of motif running throughout his work, leveraging the geometric forms, combined with horizontal and vertical lines. This is not only observed in his paintings but in his sculptures as per the below images. The work is all so very different, however, connected once the time is taken to view the recurring geometric schema that appears in the work. Wei’s work provides me with ways I may approach my making with reference to painting over my prints, using bands of colour but additionally how I may place works together to create one large print out of a number of varying prints, much like in the below image of Density no.7.

The linear structures in Liu Wei’s work makes me consider Mark Bradford’s Work.