Remy Zaugg at Brooke Alexander - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Swiss artist Remy Zaugg's novel show consisted of 21 identical small canvases, each bearing sum of two units faint words: "Not Here." As you walked from latitude to room, exploring the present to view you were confronted at each turn by the same bleak message.

Yet in the environment of the white cube, to use Brian O'Doherty's famous limit the works have the neighborhood of art. They're paintings, not signs, and are lovingly made: each canvas receives 14 coats of gesso with sanding between applications; then the alphabetic characters are silkscreened on. The works are identical, flat down to the placement of the nails holding canvas to stretcher. What appear to be variations between canvases are the accrue of different light sources and other incidental conditions. The organ of sight searches, nonetheless, for variation. The day I visited the display some wag had stuck a "sold" dot beneath single canvas, and I started at the work for a brace of minutes, asking myself on what account a collector had chosen to purchase this particular painting without of all those in the show

If there were solitary one "Not Here" piece in the midst of other, more conventional works, it would be an amusing quip, like "Out to Lunch" upon a gravestone. But taken together, the pieces be deprived of any humor and demand consideration in esthetic bounds As evidenced by the sketches and trial studies reproduc in the exhibition catalogue, Zaugg clearly wearied a lot of time making critical decisions as to typeface, word position and the like. There is something bad of course, in lavishing all the work of art-making upon something that proclaims absence. What exactly is "Not Here"--art? meaning? I imagine Zaugg takes Magritte's "This is not a pipe" single step further. His point, no doubt, is the use of art techniques to make an thing which serves as an interrogative device for questioning the meaning and object of art. But since it proclaims any answers to be elsewhere, there looks little reason for the viewer to stick around.

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