A Painting Is A Painting Isn't A Painting

We don’t ask ourselves why we look at paintings. We look at paintings because they are made to be looked at. For all of its self-reflexivity, painting has become more rather than less of an ideology. It’s just there. Part of the air we breathe. Can a painting ultimately be about anything other than itself? If the common denominator among all paintings is that they are things made to be looked at, then just as soon as we speak of differences that make each painting unique, we could also speak of their essential sameness: a painting is a painting is a painting. Maybe recourse to painting’s materiality is symptomatic. It isn’t so much a recourse to materiality as much as materiality trumps whether or not we view painting.

In 1940, Clement Greenberg published his seminal essay Towards A Newer Laocoon in which he advanced the rubric of medium specificity.   That same year also marks the discovery of the cave paintings at Lascaux.  Between their discovery and the advent of radiocarbon dating, Lascaux belongs as much to modernity as it does the Pleistocene.  The notion of painting as an ontological part of human existence is exactly the same as age as ontological investigations into painting itself.  For all the hackneyed romanticism in the link between Pollock and Lascaux, painting for better or worse remains haunted by questions of its being.  Alongside the recycling of styles (a fixture of postmodernism), a certain recourse to materiality is now simply a given. The expanded field becomes inert, which is also where it seems non-painters can begin to exercise their interests. 

There are no painters here.  There are, however, enough reflections on the medium for it to qualify as a no holds barred painting exhibition.  These reflections take different forms.  Some are relatively conventional in appearance (Anthea Behm, Mike Rubin).  Others are in the medium of film/video (Victoria Fu and David Haxton).  And still others, despite having painting as their subject, qualify more in their spatial bearing as sculpture (Geof Oppenheimer, Amanda Ross-Ho).  In any and all cases they address painting in a manner pointed and discursive enough to make them indistinguishable from the medium of painting itself.  Of equal importance is the dialogue between the works in the exhibition, whether they address a meditation on the relationship between illusion and stereometry (Oppenheimer/Haxton); the use of volatile materials (Behm/Oppenheimer); the hand, and more specifically the use of and need for prophylactics (Ross-Ho/Behm); and last but not least metaphysical musings on nature of truth and illusion (Haxton/Rubin/Fu).  

Works by: Anthea Behm, Victoria Fu, David Haxton, Geof Oppenheimer, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Mike Rubin

This group exhibition is guest curated by Hamza Walker.