Albert Mertz at Croy Nielsen

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Variations and permutations of style are the most bludgeoningly tiresome aspects of contemporary art; artists implanting their "subject" in mass produced canvases, themselves into little Fordist factories, producing the worst thing an artist can, a "series." Some finding "criticality" in an ironic exhaustion like Josh Smith or Ann Craven. Then the whole zombie painting deal. It leaves us exhausted for an artist like Mertz. It becomes hard to articulate a difference without rimshoting around some basket of the "authentic." Though he was before all that.

Albert Mertz at Croy Nielsen

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Perhaps stronger conceptual forebear than the Supports/Surfaces group to the likes of Dianna Molzan for whom Hainley gave the lovely description of "voguing their structure" i.e. striking the poses of painting, brandishing its look, flaunting itself, but perhaps "Deconstruction of the furnishing of painting" Mertz programmatic version -  "serv[ing] as an intellectual exercise, declining all conceivable cases of painterly possibilities, but lastly also becomes a physical exercise for the viewer since ‘the labour of the audience ought to be the same as that of the artist’" - best meets the definition given on Paris is Burning as "a kind of institutionalized showing-off."

Albert Mertz at Freddy

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What is left of a Mertz painting?  Blue+red's arbitrary constant - chosen for its particular ugliness - leaves what? Puzzled faces, squares. Ryman or Buren and it's easy to say what we are looking at - everything but the color, everything but the stripes. Mertz it's hard to say. Its programmatic abundance of variables adds up to a wonderful arbitrariness, a sort of magical nothingness, a caffeine-free sugarless Coke.