Philip TAAFFE ( 1991 ) "UNTITLED" 1991 It is difficult to use the word "imprint" to qualify a contemporary art work; not only because the great exhibition - shown lastyear at Centre Georges Pompidou - seems to have exhausted the argument, but particulary because of the vaguely anachronistic taste this word has. I do not believe, however, that a more adequate term can exist to name the forms which live in Philip Taaffe’s painting. Imprint, not as image of an absence, nor as a process for self definition - signature - but as widened expression of "pure feeling", like the steadiness of the emergence of the image itself. To paraphrase Derrida, we can say that in these works, the imprint is not "physical trace" but becomes generation. Style.