Belem Lett Bending over backwards

The extreme level of effort to make something happen is said to be ‘bending over backwards’. Speaking to this act, this work is part of an ongoing series looking at the compositional potential of a minimal process.

Here, the linear path of paint is broken at intervals and reconfigured with new colour combinations that link up to form a continuous path of colour and light. The brush movement has multiple references, including traversing space, the artist’s bodily movement, the emotive potential of colour, the confines of the picture plane and car travel. It also directly refers to Albert Einstein’s thought experiment that imagined what travelling alongside a beam of light would look like.

Belem Lett, 2022