GAMBITS
THOUGHTS ON THE STRATEGIES OF SIX ABSTRAG ARTISTS
"There is iust one painting every time/l
-Ad Reinhardt
Neil Campbell, Steve Di Benedetto, John Francis, Olivier Mosset, Peter Schuyff and Michael Scott count among the few artists today who are contributing to a new language of abstraction, 011 having demonstrated over the last several years a strengtf, of commihnent to a specifically abstract practice.
GAMBITS, an exhibition of work at the Leo Kamen Gallery, does not seek to illustrate any one theory concerning abstraction. Nor does it homogenize practices which are, by their nature, wildly heterogenous. Co-curated by participants Neil Campbell and John Francis, the exhibition is simply intended as an eclectic mix of noteworthy work in the field. Although each artist has developed a distinctive and sophisticated abstract idiom, all have some striking characteristics in common.
As a group the artists deal with contemporary reality in an intense and uncompromising way, while distancing themselves from the traditional genealogy of Modernism. As a consequence, their artwork demonstrates a decidedly confrontational edge, a quality of radical newness and an interrogatory character which distinguishes it from most other work being done in this area. Each of the six artists succeeds in making abstraction new again, although they also express doubt about the possibility of doing so.
The old grammar" of Modernism gives way here to a more contemporary language, one as provocative as it is topical and strange. The artists' chosen vocabularies are incommensurable with one another and all catch us off guard. There is no sameness here. Each painter is critical of the history of Moder"nism. Each attempts to deconstruct it meaningfully in terms ; which betray a struggle with a technological reality that has somehow become inimical to them--ond to us. In other words, their"s is not an abstraction somehow estranged from the real world, but one acutely conscious of technology's dark side. They are attuned to the dire predicament of "data overload" within the social landscape.
These are restJess pointings that would overtake time. They hove little or nothing to do with abstraction's heroic past. There is no sense of nostalgia here for the sundry abstract vocabularies of yesteryear. There are elements of pastiche and knowing asides to the genealogy of Modernism, but these are now rife with irony and tongue-in-cheek references.
Any portent of tomorrow in these abstractions is not to on idyllic dream-world but to a sort of glowering dystopia. Several of the artists represented seek to undermine what they consider to be the specious logic of Modernity, in works which eschew passi'/ity for aggressive self- questioning and subversiveness. Each and every one asserts that there is life after formalism.
Neil Campbell's pointings are based upon dot field systems which have an unsettling optic
effect. Campbell is primarily interested in addressing what he calls the lIelectric body" of the
observer. His work always keeps us off balance. It centres and decentres us.
Campbell is at ease whether working on wood, stretched canvas or the surface of a wall.
when painted directly on the wall, his work addresses the body of the observer and the issue
of architecture simultaneously. In a sense, it is transformed from painting proper into a form of environmental installation, encompassing the observer completely and tt.us securing a maximum investiture of self. He edits his dot fields in order to obtain a specific con~gurotion the observer can then infiltrate.
The gaps in his fields where the dots have been removed ore like abysses that threaten to
swallow us up. The fact that we project with alacrity into the gaps he creates demonstrates
how profoundly interactive-ond consummately sub~~is work is. When we enter the interstices between the gaps, the whole body becomes inextricably involved in the perception
of his work. His painting functions not only as on optic trap, then, but as an effective snare
for the body as well.
The result for us is an instobility, 0 destabilizing fixation. Once we hove invested ourselves
in his pointing, we find it hard to extricate ourselves. One might suggest that the dots in his
paintings somehow elide with the very pores of our skin, the neurons in our forebrain. The overlap con be discomfiting. Perceptual traps, his paintings ore remarkably physiological.
Steve OJ Benedetto's frenetic ~eld paintings seem to express psychic calamities we can only j guess at. Di Benedetto says: III am interested in depicting what happens when the codes are ! jammed, when the logic of the circuit breaks down, resulting in an absurd deformity within the system. He somehow evokes a life situation after entropy. Di Benedetto specializes in painting by accretion. The painting plane is a depository for his sequential acnons, while his process approximates a sort of IIfree jazz" approach to the
act of pointing. The surface of his work reAects our world as a disaster area, and our experience of it as a no-man's land located somewhere between reality and its reproduction. Fraught with the gnomic expletives of acrylic spray and aluminum point, his paintings suggest the end result of technology run amok. An hallucinatory reality holds sway.
Di Benedetto is virtually alone in articulating, using an energetic abstract syntax, our sense of being technologically overwhelmed in a world that is already far too intricate and
elusive. The work offers a sense of dissolution, and the denial of all certainty.
John Francis's lithe and always rigorous painted reliefs are at once aggressive and seductive,
stoking a powerful claim on the observer. Francis uses unonhodox materials to make objects
that effectively mimic and critique the product/perceptual languages which structure the social world and imprison us in our consumer miasma.
His objects have the aura of something manufactured to serve an unknowable purpose.
Francis uses lateral aluminum metal strips, either pointed or burnished, mounted in sets or
singly on the wall. Each bar contains two-to.four lateral planes or zonesJ pointed in contrasting
colours (black and white, say, or red and black). There is an echo in his work of various
coding systems, such as the patterns used to register consumer products. This results in a
shock of startled recognition. The coloured "codes" in the bars themselves have a physiological impact, alluding to a relationship between the body of the viewer and the size and lengths of
the bars; we try to square our own body-image with what Francis presents.
The works also remind us of heraldic 'charges." Indeed, this is literally true, in that the
objects are peculiarly loaded and charged with colour, which immediately leave their imprint.
Rather than reassure us, they seek to, and succeed, in undermining our comfort and the
banality of our belief in consumer society.
Restless things, these works seem to promise transit even when they appropriate the wall
plane-and our personal'1ived space/-with an unprecedented finality- The artist reveals
and revels in the unseen alchemy of the consumer society that beckons ta us from all sides.
Olivier Mosset's work represents a sophisticated and vigorous reappraisal of trends in
abstraction, beginning and perhaps ending with monochrome. Indeed, his work is persuasive
! testimony to the continuing viability of monochromal pointing. His paintings have no external ; referents or anecdotal values. They simply exist. of course, the sole and ultimate referent they : have is us-his viewers. Their considerable presence, or auratic individuality, is sufficient to
captivote our attention. Masset's monochromes do encompass and can change us. They have an overwhelming, but never brutal, impact upon the observer. Monumental and assured in their resolutely alien character, ft1ey represent a sophisticated end-game sensibility in the field of abstraction, in
which subjective decisions are still possible.
More remarkable still, each monochrome differs markedly from the one that preceded it;
the autonomy and individuality of each is always preserved. Wherner they are mode by or for him, there is never any deadening spech"e of sameness, however much the format and colour may seem to repeat from canvas to canvas.
The feisty and somewhat garish apple green monochrome in the present exhibition disabuses us of any notion that Mosset would abandon painting, for in its sensuous totality, his work forces us to critically confront the aura of our consumer society, with its multiplicity of colourfully packaged byproducts. It has a startling clarity we have come to associate with
all of Mosset's work.
Peter Schuyff's pattern paintings have elaborate structures which appear based upon microscopic, if not subatomic, reality- It is a reality rife with idiosyncrasies, modali~es and distortions which slowly disclose themselves as we observe them. Far from being static entities, they are in fact possessed by a phenomenal dynamism- They attract us because their appearances inspire avarice. We want to possess them, or have them possess us.
The field structures of Schuyff'S paintings are mantra.like, the subtle weave of their
patterning augmented to an unforeseen order of magnitude which disturbs and confounds us. They have a formal and perceptual complexity that slowly unfolds in the observing, which is surprising since Schuyff is an artist who does not proceed .tIeoretically, but rather pursues the dialectics of process.
Schuyff is also obviously on artist enamored of .tie methodologies used to make paintings, though the phenomenology of making is itself crucial. It shows in the work-in its streamlined craft and resplendent frachJred surfaces.
Their pattern and movement hypnotize and otheJ'Wise entrance us, making the paintings
and works on paper a sort of entry into another order of reality} where we are no longer so
self assured, so confident about just what it is that we are seeing. Perhaps this is because , they induce in us changing percephJal presumptions from one viewing to the next, and their
surreal elegance ensures that we keep on looking-

Michael Scott specializes in lateral stripe paintings which} he maintains, are impossible to i look at. They seem phenomenally compre.ssed, and assuredly tax the gaze. This artist takes I opticality to its logical extreme, where the observer is given no choice but to look closely and , then be turned away, so strong is the viewing experience.

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