Using loose pages from found books, journals and historical files as a backdrop, the drawings and paintings included in this exhibition comment on the boundaries of language and engage in an often random dialogue between the artist’s work and the source material. Using his own lexicon of forms, Jack Warren interprets, reconfigures, and defaces the underlying information to create compelling, often improbable works on paper.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, The Oblique Narrative, is an installation of over 100 drawings mounted on wood blocks. The drawings are manifestations of the artist’s random but methodical process, evolving from abstractions of common forms, figures, symbols and language. In Warren’s words, they are “maps of a dream world extracted by way of scientific process and accidental design.” Other drawings in the main exhibition space are experiments in incidental construction through arbitrary mark making. Imaginary forms emerge through Warren’s system of controlled catastrophe, in which idiosyncratic lines and random compositions outline a fragmented landscape of potential realities. Much of the work in the exhibition evokes the writings of William S. Burroughs, French existential philosophers, and other influences. The small paintings on paper in the south gallery, Towers Open Fire, portray lone figures suspended in spaces full of gestural marks suggestive of hyper motion. These images reveal Warren’s interest in the convergence of high and low – bringing together art, science, literature, film, philosophy, street culture and graffiti.