Greg Parma Smith at Museum im Bellpark

(link)

The icon (the symbol, the chart, tarot) is inherently pointed. It is a sign. But a sign where signifier does not require a signified. The point is signification, not significance. This is the task of painting. To appear meaningful. To jewel hieroglyphs and pretend a rosetta stone. Parma Smith makes the jeweling obvious, arbitrary, faceting our semio-gemstones, painting, they are shells, empty, and yet it works. 


See too: "These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning. Bestow objects a blessing. In a video game the object would hover and spin. In a novel, the detective would pull them from earth for a magnified look. The monolith us monkeys dance around, point at. They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning."

Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark

(link)

Not knowing is unacceptable, and outright rejection would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.


See too: Kaspar Müller at Société, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori