Alexander Forbes interviews painter David Reed on the occasion of an exhibition of paintings at Häusler Contemporary, Zürich, on view through August 17, 2013.

Reed comments: "I started some paintings in the 60s of brush marks. I wanted them to be directly about process, to show how the painting was made. But they looked like process and like something else, like emblems of brush marks or reproductions of brush marsk, or photographs of brush marks. There was a doubling that I didn’t expect. It took me a while to understand and to accept it. And then I decided that there was a relation to the photograph, to photography and film. I decided that I wanted there to not only be a resemblance in surface but also in the way that the paintings were structured. So I started thinking about panning movements, cuts, extensions from the edge, concerns of how film is structured rather than how painting is structured. But now, even the idea of the photographic has changed into a digital realm. It used to be that photography or film was about the uncanny but also had a definite reference, an index, to reality. But now, I don’t think that’s true. In the digital world, we all realize how easy it is to make photography not about reality but about your idea of what reality should be. So now, the paintings are more about an evolving sense of this strange world we’re in where we see what’s really there but also are so influenced by media and the digital that we can easily get confused about what’s real and what isn’t real."