Erik Otsea and Jan Tumlir at Jan Kesner - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In May 1988 L.A. artists Jan Tumlir and Erik Otsea manufactured a single 4-by-5-foot canvas and began to work out sequential paintings on its surface. The actual renascent canvas of the men's eight-year cast resides in a studio somewhere and is publicly aired single in the form of photographic likenesses that it no longer bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos Each state of the painting is titled. The photos--dye coupler prints approximately the size of the painting, as well as a certain quantity of less than half that size--show the oblique and self-referential titles upon window mats or stamped upon the side of frames that be like highly finished stretcher bars. greatest in quantity photos reveal one or more rounding mirrors temporarily embedded in the canvas at the time of its painting, which capture images of the artists and their camera equipment at the instant of photography.

With this device, the artists specifically direct to Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait and its detailed representation of a rounding mirror that reflects the vicinity of the artist as author of the painting and witness to its occasion. Otsea and Tumlir's temporary paintings Antwerp Speedway and zealot Convention (both paintings 1995) reproduc the famous work's chandelier and black and white tiles seen in receding perspective.

sum of two units other photos represent the sequentially related paintings Salon Apocalypse 2000 and Curious Cave (both 1991) No mirrors were embedded in those paintings, which nonetheless played upon the Platonic parable of the essential and its shadow. They were based upon a grisaille reworking of Samuel FB Morse's painting of a Louvre salon (a work that, not incidentally, temporally coincided with the birth of photography). In Salon Apocalypse 2000 the paintings showed as salon furnishings in Curious Cave are systematically overlayed over by sections of concentric black and r circles, perhaps a regard to the agenda of modernism.

The artists do not seek for to create an "accurate" replica of any of the temporary paintings with their photographs. Various kinds of studio or outdoor lighting flatten representation or amplify and distort surface irregularities. The Kesner Gallery lighting upon the photographs added another layer of incident.

The artists included individual actual painting in the exhibition. Sand Pigment Painting, a rough-surfaced, grayish monochrome, was made by dint of using pigment sanded from the original canvas's point of time as A Small Piece of this World (1996) A photo of A Small Piece exhibits that the sanding exposed layers of the paintings that preced it. An elaborately worded label allude tos a picaresque narrative, connects titles and touchs of many of the painting's incarnations, and indicates that the exhibition invited a careful reading.

Finally, the artists plugg three "core samples" from the renascent canvas directly into the wall and, appropriate to their means painted them over with gallery white. As a investigation in visual information, mediation and the layerings of time, the exhibition was graceful, smart and engaging.

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