Michael Rutherford talks to painter Jonathan Allmaier about his work.

Allmaier comments: "I think the key to letting the paintings make themselves is to regard the materials, along with their contingent circumstances (and it’s silly to think of circumstances as separable from an object anyway) as mental states, without distinction from a particular physical state. Then agency is there already – agency isn’t an abstract, supernatural ether: for us at least, we can only know it or talk about it or have it in relation to some object, and it even can’t be distinguished from a particular object. Making the paint is helpful for this. Then there’s physical color – tangible, weighted color, not just visual color or abstract color. This color has mentality (not my mentality) precisely because it is physically particular – the concept of the color isn’t impoverished by separation from the world. The stretcher is a very important step too. The kind of paint (and the way the paint ought to be treated, which is really the same thing, for a given painting) depends on the particular spatial or object quality of the canvas, which depends on the scale of the stretcher. So the stretcher is a type of drawing, which can get re-drawn if necessary by cutting and rebuilding it."