Callum Green: On Painting and Movement
Catalogue Essay
Callum Green
Devember 2025
“If I knew where I was going, I would not write.”
— Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing (1991)
I. Metaphors
The metaphor of the journey can be closely associated with the process of painting: a displacement in which the point of departure is known, but not the point of arrival. Metaphor derives from the Greek metaphorá, a term that was also used to describe physical transport. There is something compelling in imagining that one can step into a metaphor, as something that carries us from one conceptual place to another. Painting involves taking on this displacement without any guarantee of resolution.
Meaning emerges, if it does at all, within the process itself, through traces, interruptions, and detours that gradually compose the surface of the canvas. In the work of Callum Green, this idea of metaphor-as-transport allows painting to be understood as a trajectory. During a studio visit some time ago, he described the pictorial process as an exploration of multiple paths, in which each decision opens and closes potential directions. His paintings move through an active pictorial space, generating internal displacements that compel the viewer’s gaze to move with the painting, to accompany it in its uncertain advance and, in some way, to be
displaced by it.
II. Displacements
Within this process, painting can never confirm theories, but it can help to lose them along the way. It entails accepting this risk: working from an active state of not-knowing, where the image does not respond to a prior idea. Creation involves letting thought fall away, allowing it to become unstable and to reformulate itself through contact with matter. As Hélène Cixous suggests, it begins precisely at the moment when control is suspended and knowledge no longer precedes the act.
As painting advances, what once seemed to support it: a sensation, a theory, perhaps an expectation, gradually loses its consistency. Creating from not-knowing means paying attention to what has not yet taken form and, above all, working without the promise of a final image. Nor an ending.
III. Obstacles
Every displacement encounters resistance along the way. To think of the canvas as a problem is to acknowledge, and at times deliberately produce, obstacles within the process. Not in order to overcome them quickly, but as necessary resistances that force a pause, redirect the gesture, and ultimately require the path to be reconsidered. In Green’s own words:
“A certain kind of gesture or colour might completely close down an idea or path I had in mind for a painting, or open it up to something entirely different. Sometimes I paint something and realise there is no other path to take: as if the work has become completely closed, and then that is the finished work, or you have to do something drastic to obliterate what is already there.”
From this perspective, painting becomes a field of constant negotiation, where each decision generates a new friction and each friction reshapes the course of the work. Rather than understanding difficulty as something negative, painting is activated precisely at this point of friction. The obstacle slows the process down, introduces doubt, and unsettles what was anticipated. It is within this interruption that the process becomes truly productive. Thinking with the obstacle (rather than against it) means accepting that painting does not advance through the accumulation of successes, but through ongoing dialogue with what resists.
In Callum Green’s process, the canvas does not function as a compliant support. Its surface imposes limits and returns the gesture transformed into a new problem. From this perspective, painting does not consist in resolving these frictions, but in sustaining them long enough for a new displacement to occur.
IV. Traces
Along this journey, something is inevitably lost. But what journey does not involve loss along the way? In other words: to lose the way is the only way to find another. The trajectory is preserved in fragments, as a constellation of traces.
Green’s paintings invite the viewer to reconstruct these traces, to imagine a path they have not themselves walked, yet one they can enter through the surface of the canvas. The gaze steps into the metaphor and moves from one point to another as layers and colours vibrate, and marks respond to one another. Understood in this way, painting offers something more vital than arrival: the possibility of continuing to move.