Statement
I play with words and phrases - using them as points of departure. I enjoy experimenting with different materials and am driven by the desire to look for things inside other things. The work oscillates between figuration and abstraction effortlessly, whilst continuing to maintain a fresh quality and sense of humour.
My art is about questioning values and individual expression.

MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY

Wayne Warrens work is many-faceted. There is an immediate wit and playfulness leading to deeper philosophical questions often associated with societal values.
The apparent flippancy of the image and the text in works such as Need / Want, reference our values and life-style. The pretty coloured biscuits, with the words Want and Need on either side, point to the greed, and materialism of our consumerist society and the inability of some to distinguish between the two. Warren recounts a story told him by a friend who, on seeing the biscuits remarked that in South Africa they provided biscuits for the under-privileged as a source of nutrients. The recipients did not want the biscuits C they needed them.
Paul Klees, Tightrope Walker, is a metaphor for the balancing act of life itself C those who are fortunate maintain the balance. Wayne Warren believes that we are connected in a meaningful way to life and the world when we are able to realise balances between apparent opposites such as humour and seriousness; practical reality and spiritual contemplation; aesthetics and confrontation.
The work in Tempting God exhibition, Adding 2, is a pun on the contemporary Chinese performance work, To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain. In his work Warren uses objects to address issues of waste and conservation. Discarded religious images are found amongst detritus such as bottle tops, used razor blades, plastic cutlery, pins and clips. The uncomfortable relationship between the unwanted material objects and spiritual icons creates further complexities in the work. Inherent in contemporary societies replacement of traditional spiritual practices with material acquisition, are the massive problems associated with overuse of resources and recycling. The issue of belief is also being addressed in the work of many young Chinese contemporary artists - the shift from spiritual faith to a belief in the capacity of political, and more recently, economic power to transform lives has been found wanting for the majority of people who are left with a spiritual void.
Despite his seriousness, Warren still manages to adopt an attitude of self-irony. He casts the objects in Adding 2 in latex for easy transport and sprays the result in gold paint. His ability to see and use irony enables him to expose situational values without moralising or pontificating on right and wrong. He sees the yin and yang of policies, practices, conventions as two sides of the same coin (or biscuit) C a circular continuum rather than parallel paths. Although born in England, Warren embraces many Eastern philosophies and beliefs.
On one of many excursions to the Himalayas from both Nepal and Tibet, Warren was reminded that the essentials for survival lay in a few small things like a torch, paper and a box of matches C NOTHING else mattered.
Reg Newitt
Beijing, 2009

Much Ado About Nothing

Civilization, suggested the great English historian Kenneth Clark, is energetic, confident, humane, and compassionate, based on a belief in permanence and in the necessity of self-doubt. A firm believer in the humanist legacy, Clark took as self-evidentiary mans capacity to make good the things of the green earth. However cultures whose histories are long, especially those of a sedentary variety, can attest to an accumulation, not merely of objects and notions of esteem, but of immense detritus as well. Altogether they are the physical conditions within which we pass our daily lives and the means by which our end may be devised.
From the perspective of contemporary art practice, the background presence of our societys trash and treasure is both cause for alarm and at times an essential if not inescapable frame. Under such a condition, many of the ephemeral gestures conceived by conceptually minded artists would simply, were it not for the accumulated presence of our anthropogenic world, be stripped of meaning. But before we cast a derisive eye over contextually dependent practices, let us also remember that attentiveness to cultural context has given rise to both a broadening and deepening within the play of situational aesthetics.? British artist in particular have in recent decades made much of contextual frameworks, so much so that their works have often outraged the viewing public.
One such artist, whose work takes as its theme the issue of cultural detritus, is English conceptualist Wayne Warren. His new frieze work Adding two inches to the top of the room, is a tapering cast rubber construction in which all manner of refuse, from mobile phones to discarded nuts and bolts are present. Forming a slender gold-encrusted layer, these objects can be read in a variety of ways. Considered horizontally, they mimic the unending energy of mechanised factory-line production. Cross-sectionally, they evoke something of the geological fossil bank, whereby entire eons are contained in a slender strip of earth; a thing certainly suggested by the works unambiguous title.
Revelatory of the frieze sequence is Warrens Nothing series; a body of sculptural works and two-dimensional images in which the word nothing is the central object of concern. Here a claim is staked on the seemingly empty notion that is nothing, the artist having reified that which is seldom given form. Humorous though it might seem, Warrens materialisation of nothing echoes one of western civilisations more ancient philosophical concerns, a like-minded interest being assumed by the 5th Century Greek philosopher Parmenides.

Damian Smith, 2009

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