After 25 years of a practice that centered upon a conscious estrangement from any conventional approach to the making of paintings, in the interest of testing the limits of the painting form, Joe Fyfe found himself engaged in isolating the gesture as an element that plays with the conventions of openness and structure, improvisation and deliberation.

Fyfe begins by applying gestural brushstrokes onto scraps of castoff canvas from other works. He then affixes them to fresh, minimally colored, if not unmarked, sized canvas rectangles. Unlike conventional collages, which they resemble, he cuts holes of similar shapes into the canvas for them, making for a continuous plane.

On other works, Fyfe repurposes distressed industrial signage which he has likened to the surface of traditional oil paintings. These are often applied on top of the support, utilizing the color of the canvas, continuing his nonrepresentational emphasis on the givens of physicality, support and color, and of allowing the intrinsic properties of the materials to dominate the compositions.