Thursday, October 24, 2019

David Ostrowski at Sundogs


(link)

Ostrowski had originally come up by returning the Krebberian moment to its Barre roots. Fay aersols perfumed on blank canvases. They looked a little crustier, which was nice on the iPhones they were mostly transacted on, this was the life of them. They looked real like reclaimed wood. And now Ostrowski continues this painting as excuse for stains, an interest in, say, the way say walls accumulate graffiti, Ostrowski's accumulate painting. Why do we like this. Because it doesn't look like "Painting." It coopts that vernacular hand you find on subway walls and alleyways. The grime accumulating in Parisian corners is not cloying the way painting is, with an artist attempting to woo, and thus its, the grime's, more sunset moments feel unsullied, natural. Remember all those Gedi Sibony stolen freight doors? Sibony simply lifted the vernacular. Which seems to be what is pressured out and deployed here. The owls are arbitrary (Ostrowski says as much), that's important to the realness, to grime, to sunsets.

"The small pleasure of [...] found paintings is their modernist uncanny... That those uncaring, underpaid to blot out corporate logos for truck's resale, might - through dumb luck or undiscovered brilliance - have painted something fine. Their unartful reason a pleasantly fresh breeze of non-art. [...] That brushstrokes without art intention always look best, and these just made to cover, to stop beer from selling itself, so painting could."


Read: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale