Tomma Abts at Galerie Buchholz

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Stubborn becomes a horn filling the air, an ongoing announcement: "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something." Stubborn. Repetition is part of the point, rubbing past painting into these "new" ones. The "abstract Morandi" - the permutations of a few simple vessels - flitting between abstraction and concrete shadows. Unsure whether these pull off the same miracle. 

Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

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The monastic adherence to a form could become its own gratification, refusal, a withholding that feels like control over its pleasure. Or the canvases' ascetic ground a soil ripe for tilling. Instead the cut corners of mild invention placidly chose neither, shaped with a sorta-not-sorta-evolution for the form. It's a wildly unexciting development, threatening the whole enterprise with its contaminant arbitrariness, the whole hermetic tight-ass pleasure suddenly loosed with an open cavity. You can't cut the paper in origami, and if you did, you would expect results better than this. And perhaps then that is the point, of a relaxed attitude or orifice, a bit more air in the room, the painting, unlike a well made chair, doesn't need to stand up, because it will do so under scrutiny to call that air its fourth leg, painting is in fact arbitrary, we can hope for nothing else, even if we had hoped for something else.

Tomma Abts at greengrassi

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Even just 2 years ago Abts still seemed an island of jilted tight trompe-leoil abstraction perhaps only harking back to the much forgotten "abstract illusionists" or all the way to constructivists. But the rise of tight-knit illusionist abstraction, in say Braunig or Orion Martin as much as Owens among others, makes Abts seem less hermitically sealed as the reference - if not influence - spreads in the reaction against mass-processed abstraction and toward slow-abstraction and icon illusionism.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

Tomma Abts at David Zwirner

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Abts’s indifference to Artworld concerns is a triumph of deafness, a Morandi-like hermeticism, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out. That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting,” and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal, Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, the blankness of a Morandi, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed.