Friday, July 12, 2019

Anthony Pearson at Marianne Boesky


(link)

A lot of art makes the process of getting paint onto the canvas itself the problem of art. Going back to Stella's auto-flex on the canvas, an excuse for the painting. Reason without reason. Simply was. Which was the point then, but however many decades later we suddenly had "process orientated abstraction" whose own tautological reasoning spread infectiously as a means to manufacture object meaning. Pearson - who has been around longer than the process dead - has been inventing all sorts of means to get art to semi-auto-materialize. The "paint" here is poured and peeled, and the others grated with rococo lines, etc. So what you see is what you see, a process in getting the materials to self-expose. But the image is beside the point, the point is simply materialization, sediment something that is elegant, pretty, capable of walls.