The works included in this exhibition examine the notion of discretion, which is perhaps one of the most sensitive attitudes an artist may possess. At certain moments, however, the works turn their back on this quality and try to ignore it. The installation thus shifts back and forth between an engagement with reticence and its denial.
In the first room, a series of ‘paintings’ is exhibited that have been created from studio remnants – each piece, before being stretched over its support, was once part of a larger piece of canvas purchased at an art supply store with the intention of being used. The artist kept these scraps, with the vague idea that, one day, they might be useful in his studio. Perhaps they’d be handy for wiping brushes, or could be mounted on a smaller stretcher? Thus the canvas fragments made their way from New York to Los Angeles, the city to which the artist recently moved. These fragments, so anonymous on the one hand, yet such poignant reminders of method and making on the other, remained untouched until they re-presented themselves as an opportunity for a pragmatic platform.
The ‘paintings’ shown here do not, in fact, contain any pigment other than the occasional use of primer, nor are they based upon anything tangible. These are paintings that exist without the involvement of conscious decision; they are images, yet they represent nothing. The idea that a painting is based upon something implies understanding and recognition; these blank canvases do deprive one of these possibilities. And because of the burden of the progressive nature of life, they should not be seen as a new chapter in the artist’s oeuvre, but simply for what they are: absolutely ignorant repositories in which reside the notion that thoughts provoked by a conscious, or subconscious, experience can never be truly eradicated.
