I feel compelled by the emotional responsiveness of the act of painting. It can be both instinctive and contemplative, loud and quiet, fast and slow, confident and doubtful, generous and stubborn, cathartic and stressful. It’s a daily companion that allows me to move between a wide variety of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. I place no hierarchy on my influences so everything and anything can filter into my work, from a film to a conversation overheard on a bus.
Over recent years, global events have led me to think more about free will, choice, chance, reality, and illusion. “There are no choices without chances”- George the Poet. Choice and chance intrigue me as a painter because as concepts they are invisible and intangible and can perhaps be said to exist only through their visible and physical consequences. To me, the visible world is just the perimeter of what painting can explore, and painting is an opportunity to delve beyond this into questions of the human condition. Motifs including dice, cards, and ladders began to sprout into my paintings as I considered the different lived experiences of individual choice vs. the influence of higher powers, whether that be economic, political, religious, social, cultural, natural, or something else. I was also interested in how these ideas spread across and are portrayed differently across genres of art and culture, including social realism, magical realism, science fiction, and surrealism.
Many of my recent paintings incorporate non-traditional materials and found objects. Paintings such as 'The rest of the day' and 'Any old iron?' are formed by an assemblage of substrates including scrap metal, carpet, plastic, cardboard and vinyl flooring. One of the reasons I do this is because of a curiosity towards material culture and the social life of objects. I was interested in how these materials and objects can, through a mixture of chance and choice, make a journey into the world of my paintings, carrying with them some small whispers of the place and time they came from. For example, ‘The Life of Jorge’ uses found timesheets (from a former factory worker at the now derelict C.U.F. Industrial Estate in Barreiro, Portugal) to create the dice being thrown from the sky. Similarly, ‘A split second’, incorporates found ‘cricket rules’, written by an unknown local child.
Excerpt below from exhibition text by Matt Retallick, click for the full article
'Joe, in the same way as Guston, presents daily life, and mines personal experience. His paintings are inspired by happenstance, such as observations from a bus window, overheard conversations, song lyrics, poster slogans, the radio news. There Are No Choices Without Chances[1], and his paintings are born of unexpected encounters. Something that happened, a conversation heard, an object found.
Brecht, in the same way, also believed in using materials close at hand, often repurposing found objects, as a means to keep things simple and representational. In Joe’s paintings, for example, you might find a towel, a broken window frame, electrical wires, a discarded shopping list, these are just some of the paraphernalia that’s visible amongst the paint. There’s a need to be resourceful, stemming from a consciousness that the world is full of surplus materials. He tells me that these objects are often the catalyst for a painting, offering a working position that’s as uncomfortable as it is exciting, bringing to the canvas unexpected contexts, and offering imagined histories.'