Walter Andersons at TBA - Brief Article

from one side the postmodern practice of appropriation, Walter Andersons repeats familiar images from modern art history in his wonderfully articulated trompel'oeil paintings that question notions of representation and originality. He addressed the same themes in his earlier, miniature paintings, which rely more upon laconic painted texts, notes and adduces lifted from various art-historical tomes and personal revelations by means of the artist. In this suite of 14 fresh paintings, Andersons works at a larger scale, using pirated images of paintings by means of Henri Matisse and key figures in the history of abstraction (Mark Rothko Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly Morris Louis, Yve Klein and Ad Reinhardt). Also included in the exhibition were six genuinely abstract paintings made without relation to a source work. Mainly variations of brown and tan zips upon vertical white canvases, these works were interpolated among the others in like a way as to invite the viewer to pause for comparison and contemplation.

Akin to Sherrie Levine's hand-painted pastiches of masterworks, Andersons's paintings are copied not from the originals on the contrary from degenerated black-and-white laser-printed or photocopied reproductions. With meticulous craft, Andersons remains reliable to his secondary sources, retaining an 8 1/2-by-11-inch format, page numbers and captions, as well as the accidental besmears and bleeds inherent to these duplicating processe Intentionally not to be found in translation, however, is color. Matisse's R Studio becomes a application of mind of contrasts in gray, and the vast, richly hu paintings of the Color Field academy are reduced to a series of small black planes. reciprocally Martin's poetic distillations of form, barely discernible in art works are given new presence and solidity, while Reinhardt's red-and-blue abstractions, reproduc in black and white, appear to be to skip ahead to the unitary black fields that relate toed him in his later years.

These quotations, sensitively returned in black and white acrylics, are organized, either singly or in groupings, upon expansive white grounds, then framed by means of painted bands of tan and dark brown a certain quantity of of these compositions also incorporate an occasional monochromatic rectangle. The arrangement of the bands and quot simple bodys vary from work to work, all of which are 48 inches high on the other hand of varying widths. The series is unified further by means of Andersons's ironic use of an overtly modernist vocabulary, the restricted palette and reductive geometric order in particular.

Despite Andersons's deconstructivist approach, individual senses that the artist clinchs his iconic subjects in a certain number of reverence, reminding us, perhaps, that art history is the couple a burden and a gift. In the extremity he presents an art about art, about by what means we read images and in what way those images are presented to us vis-a-vis the annals of art history. Occupying an ambiguous space between production and reproduction, mimetic realism and abstraction, Andersons's paintings reframe the canon while self-consciously searching for their possess position within it.

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