Zak Prekop at Galería Marta Cervera

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Prekop has notably remained unphased, almost unchanged, for the last decade. There's a sense of - like fractals - any one Prekop painting already contains every other Prekop painting, you just need to change the level of vantage. Even the color has remained a consistent off-crayola. A palette called Millennial Realtree. (Camo for the average Brooklyn apartment.) The pleasure of these paintings, succinctly stated, is abstraction turned to labyrinth. Not Stella's "what you see is what you see." But painting the puzzle before assembly. "obfuscates any sequence of steps that were taken." Which we are Jack Torrance and painting the boy sweeping away footprints in snow, us hunting for the meat, for the tender innards of poor painting. Painting must build defenses, attempt to elude apprehension, axe. 

See too: Charline von Heyl, Tomma Abts, Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Zak Prekop at Essex Street

Zak Prekop at Essex Street

reverting impressionist attempts at revealing painting's construction that Prekop turns into a game, all the jazz hands of "how's it made." It’s easy to say what is good about these. There's a level of illusionism defeating their ostensible lineage - abstraction's - matter-of-factness. We have a trust in abstraction that it isn't attempting to "hide" anything from us, its paint merely there, that these utilize against us as bait. Set the parameters and run. To mess the usual temporal signifiers of painting, what's on top not necessarily laid last, making for a confusion of the hand and appearing printed. Flat Cubism. Painting as the interesting display of its information, solving the problem of painting by heaping more on, a less neurotically charged Hans Hoffman's "push and pull" theory, painting reduced to interesting conditions.


see too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

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The preponderance of overly tasteful paintings today is, in one sense, critically justified through its “reexamination” of modernism, particularly looking towards the forgotten’s more decorative tendencies, Delauney, Munch, Jawlensky, Hantai. And, coming out the mid-late 2000’s “indexicality” boom, in which every brushstroke was quotation and the artist’s hands removed for the theft - lost in the revolution of printmaking as painting - painting today still carries viewers' heads echoing this skepticism, and thus benefits: what was once derivative and gentle is now critical. It helps if you can carry this baggage out of your school.
The most interesting thing about Prekop’s paintings is the desire for the return of his hands, while looking not. The paintings do offer a little more in person, a use of transparency of linen, puzzles of layers, etc. In reproduction the visual unfolding of it’s making - the steps of what might-be but don’t-look-like a screenprint - are lost, the cleverness gone and the predominance of its nice-design packages is all one is left with, just how unbelievably tasteful these paintings today are.