Ed Compson

autonomic system

Painting is intimate: It is an involuntary or unconscious method of communication. It produces a bodily response, both in its production in a studio, and its intimate encounter and reception within a space where the sensuousness of painterly matter results in ostensibly soulful, desired but easily marketable objects.

Painting is mechanical: It is often a technical, premeditated, application and removal of matter. It is also technical in its distribution through networks and often is found now in a digital black mirror limbo of contemporary online spaces, galleries, archives, and collections.

For me, paintings act as metaphysical magic-eyes that flicker between a diagrammatic mapping of a completed process, and an immediate, often sensuous, phenomenological effect of their current, material reality.

the autonomic system triptych is in some way trying to think through all this. Attempting to create part mechanical and part sensuous works that invoke both body and machine in their process and realization.

I have taken the diagrams of the autonomic nervous system, distorted them through a digitized and mechanical network and laser-etched them into thick oil paint.

The autonomic nervous system regulates a variety of body processes that takes place without conscious effort. The system is made of three parts, the parasympathetic, the sympathetic and the enteric. They are responsible for regulating involuntary body functions, such as heartbeat, blood flow, breathing and sexual arousal.

Medium: oil and laser etching on linen

Size: 70 x 90 cm