First of all a short description of the origins of these paintings might be useful to anybody seeing them for the first time.

This collection of photographs is not complete; and some of the photographs are of paintings which no longer exist. A studio fire in 1979 despatched at least 15 large paintings. Frankly, I have absolutely no idea what happened to a lot of my earlier paintings, I probably left them in places or gave them away...

I am an artist by nature rather than as a result of training. By that I don't mean that I needed no technical help. What I mean is that my energy has always tended towards creative expression, flowing very easily through my hands; and somehow early on I had learned to trust it. As soon as I was free in a library my hands would feel their way to the right book. The 'right' book being the next piece of information for me to find, as it were, if I followed the golden thread.

It is following this energy that has made my life what it is. My first and only formal 'art' training was at the Lanchester, Coventry,1973. It was here that I met Kriss Evetts with whom I was eventually to create a series of collaborative abstracts. Spontaneous dialogues of graphic reactions ...we used oil pastels by the hundred on huge sheets of photographic backdrop paper.

These paintings were shown for the first time in Coventry 1974,another series shown at Lancaster University Gallery 1977, culminating with the ' Paintings in the Woods' exhibition in Scorton Lancashire,1978.

These investigations left me deeply interested in the nature of randomness in graphics, experimenting for example with various representations of Pi to its first ten thousand or so decimal places.These explorations,together with a fascination with the psychological concepts behind the Rorschach ink-blots led into questions about enhancing the Rorschach quality itself, so as to achieve a sort of super-charged 'Rorchach' medium.

A vision of the absolute form of such a medium became for me a fixed idea. It had come to me one day when I had managed to step out of a dream-state so as to be able to see the dream as it were from a distance...this made it possible for me to see the material nature of the dream-substance... how it was put together. It was like taking a close look at the cinema screen and realising that the image on the screen was actually static; the only moving object being the interpretation of the dreamer...The possibility of a static image which was intrinsically fluid enough to support this movement of the interpretation and its natural progression into a story filled me (and still fills me) with energy.

From this time on there was a new dimension to the energy which came into my paintings, there was a need to create a reference to that universal abstract texture which could support any dream at all. While at the same time the paintings continued to resist any attempt at control; each painting seeming to assert its own laws.

The nature of the substance in which dreams and thought forms are made can be observed in the reaction it has under the impact of the attention. One reaction that it has is to change easily and plastically according to the kind of the attention.

The imaginal is beyond the boundaries of fantasy. In fantasy there is a storyline, stringing it all together so as to give it structure, make sense. Inrelating any experience there is a tendency of an event to become a story, a literary event, though the tendency is for framework of the story to overpower the imaginal elements.

The imaginal realm is beyond the sequential world in which a story takes place. Hanging on to the story and the linear world is another method of resisting the imaginal. This tendency to make a dream into a story is part of the distortion.

This is another reason why the dream should be treated as a quantity of dynamic material rather than a historic event. This is also why the highly defined surrealist images seemed to fall flat.They could not be other than literary objects.

“The psychical material of dream thoughts” mentioned by Sigmund Freud (‘On Dreams’ 1911) was no doubt intended merely as a model, and not to represent substances of any kind. However he did not linger over that; like Dali he went straight on, into description of the content. Hence Surrealism.

If that was about the breakdown of barriers between the conscious reality of life and the unconscious reality of the dream world, then I could subscribe to that, but without the need to fix the image, to define the alternative reality.

Nowadays the need is rather to unfix the image. Recently I have discovered, reading David Gascoyne on the Surrealists, that this was the direction Dali was heading with his ‘Paranoical Critical Method’ which he defined as "irrational knowledge" based on a "delirium of interpretation." This was a process by which the artist found new and unique ways to view the world around him. It was the ability of both the artist and the viewer to perceive multiple images within the same configuration.

The concept can be seen in Max Ernst's frottage or Leonardo da Vinci's scribbling and drawings. All of us have practiced this method when gazing, as Leonardo said, at lichen on a wall, or clouds in the sky, seeing different shapes and visages therein.The possibilities suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock were a great revelation to me. I felt that this was actually the beginning of something new, and big, a way forward for surrealist experimentation.

If my intentions as an artist had been forged in the 70's, this was the atmosphere in which it happened; there was a renewal of interest in the act of mark-making, and the nature of impulse. Analysis pervaded and obstructed the most fundamental actions of artistic impulse. There was a huge conceptual gap between the artist and the canvas. Semiotics filled the air, the scope of definition of the ‘mark’ burgeoned outwards.

My personal, tangential involvement in semiotics had started in this conceptual atmosphere of the early seventies writing haiku and poetry, thence into Cut-ups and automatic writing.

In retrospect, taking these impulses onto canvas was a step towards a working model for further semiological research. I was experimenting with ambiguity as opposed to significance as an alternative approach. In terms of semiology, what I was doing was ceating a signless medium, out of signless marks. The investigation of such a medium and such marks have been the process of my work.
The use of this medium as a vehicle iitself would involve the impulse, the connection. In terms of human psychology, it is the primary impulse that creates energy, creates the possibility of things.

Nowadays my intentions are less conceptual. The general compass direction would be about making the spiritual reality in life more obvious, or a moving towards at least the opening up of reality. Inevitably, falling short of that, what I paint are representations of a world which abounds in clues and messages and hints towards unknown truths.

Adam Closs 2008