Pictures--or the lack thereof
It's a tired, tired strategy, but so many young painters keep throwing their time and effort into it: Take a piece of canvas or paper--unprimed, or stained with some monochrome wash--and scrawl a tangle of graphic signifiers across it, like you're laying out a picnic spread of pictorial conventions.
I see it with Jiha Moon's blooms of watercolor that carry along fauns and dragons and clumps of silly string at their edges, or Maggie Michael's knots of airbrush, pooled enamel and calligraphy. I saw it at Irvine's old location last year, with Nicola Lopez, who makes apocalyptic doodles using blotches of ink, ruled lines, and cartoonish drawings of drain-pipe labyrinths...and I saw it last weekend at their current front room survey of works on paper--clearing out old inventory, natch. There's Christine Kessler's greatest-hits-of-Rauschenberg-and-Twombly collages, or Susan Jamison's graphite and string drawings of birds, hands, and spiders against blank backdrops, or Peregrine Hong's unicorn kiddie-porn drawings, or...well, it just goes on and on.
Nobody's interested in pictorial space or chiaroscuro or even composition, it seems. The page or the canvas becomes an arena in which to have fey little graphics, detached from context, fumbling around one another--an illustrator's warmed-over approximation of good ol' flat-bed construction.
Decorative, unnecessary, played-out. A lot of gallery-goers mistake these pictures for actual displays of skill. Instead, they're avoidance strategies. Why choose the rectangle if you're not interested in it? Why use the tools of illusionistic rendering to dot the unconsidered page with little episodic meanderings?
What about pictures? And I don't mean illusionistic windows onto another space or anything--just the evidence of an artist looking at the substrate/format and responding to it in some constructive, considered, foundational way.
That's my big, obvious rant for the evening, anyway.
Thoughts?
