Elena Bajo Matt Connors Alyssa Pheobus Jason Fox Jimmy Raskin Matt Saunders Alex Singh Matt Sheridan Smith

Curated by Ajay Kurian

The show’s primary engine is a partially revealed suicide letter taken from William Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions. The physical letter was folded so as to exclude certain of its sections, breaking up the already questionable flow of the text. This version of the original, dissected and partially reassembled, was then sent out to the artists involved.

The eight artists included have varying backgrounds and find themselves at different points in their careers. Though the letter does indeed deal with painting, albeit in an obscure fashion, the artists participating are not simply painters. Most, if not all of them, have a troubled, troubling, or complicated relationship to painting and its hefty legacy. The negotiations regarding the addressing and address of the artist’s work and their context determine a significant portion of the exhibition’s content. Besides inviting the artists to participate, the idea of the invitation was taken further and became the curatorial methodology: setting the parameters of the letter, choosing the artists that would perhaps most interestingly “answer” the call, and allowing them to inform the rest of the show with their responses and/or circumventions. Given no other procedure or input, the letter became their prompt and perhaps their sphinx.

The levels of mediation, borrowing, and receiving fold over one another paralleling just one process the letter has undergone. From Gaddis, through his fictional character, through the funnel of curatorial intent, to a selected group of artists results a show that equivocates between having too many bounds and not enough. One can see these forms of mediation circumscribing too small an island of creation, but if we were to examine these links of reference and repetition, we would see that there is no real beginning nor end, no definitive space delineated. One can imagine a chain descending over a still puddle of water, appearing to both descend and rise into a pile of folds.

(A final addendum. As for painting, let’s not consider it so much dead or alive, but simply as a kind of passage.) – Ajay Kurian