Steven Hubert : THIS AND THEN THIS AND THEN THIS BUT NOT THIS OR THIS
Fri. October 2nd 2009 - Thu. October 22nd 2009
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Installation by Steven Hubert
In the window of Ministry of Casual Living, between the dates October 2nd and 22nd, a new painting for every day of the exhibition This And Then This And Then This But Not This Or This will be brightly lit and visible from the street. The small portrait-oriented canvases, each painted in a day, begin with a ground zero (en francais?) Ingres-inspired reclining nude behind a floral still life and move through landscape, pattern, color, shape, painting-as-window motif, curtain and smoke as ‘cone’ motif, portrait as arte povera experiment, ejaculatory, expressive reconsideration, decorative question, stylization, collage, bocconcini sandwich-like, material-as-subject, artist searching for a suitable subject, towards abstraction, towards trompe l’oeil, towards a lie, towards truth, away from irony, towards sincerity, towards a heightened irony and then back again, towards unmitigated failure possibility.
Casual analysis of this work might reveal a reluctance to commit to a subject but with an apparent respect for structure. Unlike strict serial painting these resist aesthetic continuity: the usual way of working out formal problems through minute and precious adjustments is exchanged for a survey of broad strokes and posturing. It is like the difference between a Neu! album and Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait. While one obsesses over plate reverbs the other covers all the bases, perhaps never as well as in any one album, but with a certain cumulative effect which, though lacking focus, shows in the end a strange analytic force.
Some consideration of material is evident (never enough), but mostly the works explore pictorial strategy in the end. They are conversational but not obsessed with words: in other words, casual or small-talky. Also causal, in terms of a wandering stream or orchid pedigree.
Video by ExhibitV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oqW7FcmgA
In the window of Ministry of Casual Living, between the dates October 2nd and 22nd, a new painting for every day of the exhibition This And Then This And Then This But Not This Or This will be brightly lit and visible from the street. The small portrait-oriented canvases, each painted in a day, begin with a ground zero (en francais?) Ingres-inspired reclining nude behind a floral still life and move through landscape, pattern, color, shape, painting-as-window motif, curtain and smoke as ‘cone’ motif, portrait as arte povera experiment, ejaculatory, expressive reconsideration, decorative question, stylization, collage, bocconcini sandwich-like, material-as-subject, artist searching for a suitable subject, towards abstraction, towards trompe l’oeil, towards a lie, towards truth, away from irony, towards sincerity, towards a heightened irony and then back again, towards unmitigated failure possibility.
Casual analysis of this work might reveal a reluctance to commit to a subject but with an apparent respect for structure. Unlike strict serial painting these resist aesthetic continuity: the usual way of working out formal problems through minute and precious adjustments is exchanged for a survey of broad strokes and posturing. It is like the difference between a Neu! album and Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait. While one obsesses over plate reverbs the other covers all the bases, perhaps never as well as in any one album, but with a certain cumulative effect which, though lacking focus, shows in the end a strange analytic force.
Some consideration of material is evident (never enough), but mostly the works explore pictorial strategy in the end. They are conversational but not obsessed with words: in other words, casual or small-talky. Also causal, in terms of a wandering stream or orchid pedigree.
Video by ExhibitV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oqW7FcmgA
Presented by: The Ministry of Casual Living