> Imants Tillers is one of Australia's leading painters; he has represented Australia at Venice Biennale and held several exhibitions in museums around the world. Making a work in bronze was new to the artist and GAGPROJECTS assisted in the reproduction of his canvas-board stacks in bronze. This sculptures complete a mayor work by the artist, conceived almost two decades ago.

"Reality works in overt mystery" Jorge Luis Borges

This work consists of 120 canvasboards panels installed as a painting on a wall (one could call this 'element 1') with 6 sculptures on plinths arranged in front of it (this could be 'element 2'). Each of the 6 sculptures consists of 144 5" x 7" canvasboardspanels cast in bronze. This new work incorporates an earlier painting, Leap of Faith, 1995, and transforms another work, Tableau with closed loop, 1993, bringing them toguether and thereby creating a new totality.

Leap of Faith, 2009, spans 16 years from its gestation to its completion and comprises 984 panels (including the now inseparable bronze panels) and the work is numbered accordingly from 85904–86888.

The sculptural part of this work suggests to me a kind of 'self-portrait' but of the type explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay of 1922, The Nothingness of Personality, in wich he wants "to tear down the exceptional pre-eminence now generally accorded to the self." It is a "self portrait" which declares: "there is no whole self"; "I am like everyone else"; "the self does not exist". And in being turned to bronze, the immaterial, the evanescent, the dispensable canvasboard (self) becomes solidified, frozen and fixed forever. ...

(extract from artists essay: Leap of Faith, 2009 – for a full version of the essay please visit: www.greenaway.com.au/Artists/Imants-Tillers.html)