Two models of paint on photograph
Two coexisting photograph/paint relationships within a single founding series: across the four original Art Collision paintings, and most clearly within Four Corners itself, two distinct models of paint's relationship to photograph operate at once. A Richter/Polke-style opposition (paint as an outside force disrupting or filling a fixed, 'settled' photograph) governs the swatch-to-checkerboard-to-square lineage running through Transition and Four Nations, and traces to a confirmed direct influence -- Sigmar Polke's Rasterbilder, seen in Barcelona c. 2000, before Art Collision began. A separate, Richard Hamilton-style continuity model (paint drawing out a quality already latent in the photographic medium itself, rather than opposing it) governs Four Corners' exposed pixel-grid sky specifically -- arrived at independently in 2002, years before Hamilton entered the artist's awareness around 2010. The artist confirms holding both at once: one conscious, one unconscious.