(Text for Andrew Jensen for SIX DEGREES
catalogue)
They have a certain nudity to them, these vibrant instruments.
They only gleam at first, and don't reveal much thickness of
visual event. It depends on what you are used to looking at mostly.
They're in your face but they don't say much. They don't say
much but they want you to pay close attention. Pretty solicitous,
and pretty mute. This induced re-calibration of what you are
looking for is the main way these paintings work. The looking
goes on for a while.
How do thin things, flat paintings on the wall for the most
part, become thick? They present paradox for the viewer. Broadly
: they are both composed and they ricochet. They are tame and
wild. Pictures, and objects. Frame-bound, and yet they operate
in or organise the room. That is, by various means, the works
increase their appearance.
The Umberg's leap at you and give you a double-take. They make
the colour black radiate a lot of light.
One Knoebel sets up the colour red to topple its adjacent white
panels and twist your eye. The painting seems composed for a
while though. The painter's four small painted boxes (DIN IV)
stand proportionally a long way out from the wall and set up
a cloud of angles around each.
The dark blocks in Bambury's "Letter to Paul" look
to sheer a little, out of the picture. The Innes' paintings are
oddly transparent and oddly opaque. And the Federle, a set-square
itself, rhymes the right-angles in the gallery.
Some works stand proud of the wall, and one, Karin Sanders'
- well, I don't know, recedes? It's bouncy ; quite ambiguous
with respect to the plane it sits in, engaging the wall, like
the Shroud of Turin, without the face.
These sensuous surfaces evolve over time, as in a movie, but
much, much more slowly. At a speed of ten percent of a frame
per second they go from sleek to gliding. It is painting behaving
on the edge of sculpture in the rooms. That is, by small means
and materials, (colour, proportion, lines of sight) big means
(space and light conditions, for instance) get excited.
So far, so conventional. But the art of small things becoming
big, of more over less, is absolutely intriguing. The only person
who writes well about this ratio is Donald Judd and even he gets
muddled. How do various tight things end up loose? Simultaneously
a restricted object and an unrestricted sign? Art hastens towards
catastrophe. It must find a way to get out of the art object.
Good art is a big switch.
