Common and Pure
'Common and Pure' contains landscape paintings by Karin Kneffel, Steven Maslin and Alice Stepanek; paintings of animals and birds against monochromatic backgrounds by Claudia Pegel; and still-life paintings of domestic plastic bottles by Stephen Skidmore. All of the paintings in the show utilise references to specific genre types. However, the works are not for a moment intended to be approached as if they were landscapes or still-lifes. On the contrary, it is the invocation of historical conventions that is intended to challenge the spectator's assumptions. Ironically, this presupposes that the spectator has a fixed set of parameters for relating to the world and that a subset of these boundaries comprise the classifications used to look at art.
In other words, what you see initially a magpie on a dark green background, for example is only a sign; one that you take to be a picture of a bird represented in a style, and executed in a manner, that suggests references to 17th century Dutch still-life. In contrast, the monochromatic background has been painted in a way to sit at odds with the image of the magpie; presumably invoking a sense of vertigo in the spectator who struggles to reconcile these opposing systems of representation. The viewer is expected to see something which has not been literally represented. The viewer is asked to be self-conscious about the recognition that language relativises experience into codes which can be juxtaposed within the same framework to reveal hidden meaning.
Unfortunately, this is a position which is almost painfully familiar and the antecedents of this type of strategy easily trip off the tongue: Peter Halley, Gerhard Richter, David Salle et al. The problem is that the success of the notion that images have multiple readings readings that the audience writes their own script for has reduced the possibility of saying anything specific to virtually zero. Hence, all that a painter can do when faced with this problem, is to keep picking different references in the hope that their choices hit the right note. The grand narratives of High Modernism have evaporated leaving painters struggling to compete with other media media that often rhetoricise the thing being represented in a way that Modernist discourse once did for painting.
In the case of video, for example, the technology itself seems to overwrite images with a sense of authenticity and economy that is hard to come by in painting. Painting has become one of many ways of making images and has no independent philosophical position in relation to it's process. The how of a painting its colour relationships, texture, scale and so forth are not keys to an intrinsic meaning. These formal gestures have become signals to be read as indicative of the attitude and intention being projected. They are representative of a desire to locate work within prefigured codes of representation in order to subvert them. The results of this activity can then be assessed and discussed in the language of social studies and thus the aesthetics of painting has been replaced by associative commentary as analysis.
The real problem of the work in this show is not that the artists have failed to realise the degree to which their activity is over-defined. Rather, it is that they have not confronted the need to exceed the terms by which it is so easy to understand their intentions.
