Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By AIDAN CHISHOLM December 10, 2024
Abstraction is often seen in oppositional terms—orderly versus chaotic, linear versus fluid, intuitive versus prescribed, and so on. Broad Picnic, however, invites thinking beyond such binary terms. Bringing together twenty artists who variously engage with and push against the streamlined aesthetics of technological production, Europa sets forth a packed constellation of abstract wall-based works that evoke both geometric rigidity and painterly approximation.
Broad Picnic engages repetition not as a mode of precise replication, but rather as a framework for experimentation. In Not dancing to every song (2023), for example, Armando Nin channels the paradoxical potential for improvisation through repeated action with the use of soot as a mode of mark-making that leverages the irregularity of the candle flame. Whether through the collection of aluminum pans by Jeff Williams or the painted reiteration of planet earth as a motif by Janine Iverson, repetitive procedures mobilize art-making as a ritual activity through which the finished products emerge as temporal records of process. Antonia Kuo, Peter Davies and Angela Bidak all approach repetition through modular accumulation by conjoining multiple panels, adding spatial complexity to the respective compositions. Bidak pushes the conventions of landscape painting to the limits of coherence through vague allusion to the horizon line in fluid atmospheric abstractions that lend crucial balance alongside more exacting geometric works.
More orderly, seemingly symmetrical compositions—Miles Huston’s Verse #5 (2024), for example—initially suggest the precision of technological mediation. Upon closer examination, however, subtle irregularities across works evidence manual modes of making. The two geometric works flanking the circular window onto Division Street, Verse #5 and Michael Andrew Page’s Bivvy 15 (2023), encourage slowed looking by playing to what is perhaps an innate human inclination toward patterns. Huston’s use of colored pencil meanwhile lends texture to the subtly irregular geometric pattern, while inviting us to imagine the time-intensive, regimented drawing process—a meticulous exercise of coloring inside the lines.
In Davies’s That Moment (2024), discernible brushstrokes similarly prompt consideration of the detail-oriented task of filling in the minute squares of the warped pencil-drawn checkerboard. Signs of human imprecision undercut the manufactured perfection associated with the grid as a spatial framework here distorted and softened, seeming almost to counter the rectangular confines of the canvas. The reference to picnic blankets in the exhibition text—and through the title, Broad Picnic—resonates particularly with this topographical composition reminiscent of a sort of flexible fabric. Through the use of Photoshop and EPSON V7500 Proscanning in Infrastructure (2024), Hugh Scott-Douglas likewise reengages the grid as a dynamic spatial system prone to glitches.
This large, aesthetically diverse exhibition recalls legacies of process-based abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s, which privileged material procedures over final products. Although process does not necessarily eclipse the finished works in this exhibition, the repetitive acts indexed by these works prompt consideration of the underlying labor, while artists such as Nin afford appreciate how the particular qualities of the material inform the final composition.
The peculiar, even deceptive, materiality of works like Bjorn Copeland’s Compress/sustain curls (2017)—a compacted, folded found metal billboard reminiscent of a stiffened textile—encourages engagement with the physicality of these wall-based works that maintain a sculptural sensibility, exceeding the flatness of the picture plane. In Brock Enright’s Da48 (2024), the pastel drawing on paper convincingly postures as a dented sheet of rusted metal produced through industrial manufacturing rather than by hand.
Questions emerge, then, as to the stakes and significance of process-oriented art in this particular moment, in the context of algorithmic automation. What are we to make of the insistence on handmade techniques in the age of digital production and reproduction?
Broad Picnic stages a claim for the relevance of process-based abstraction today through works like Milly Skellington’s If You Ride Like Lightning, You Crash Like Thunder (2024), which indexes both digital and analogue techniques through a procedure that evades simple categorization as calculated or intuitive. Skellington embraces unpredictability through the use of reconfigured printers to derive a fractured composition then translated through the manual act of painting. On one hand, this translation into painting might suggest resistance to the erasure of the artist’s hand through technologization. At the same time, though, Skellington challenges notions of the handmade as antithetical to the technological, engaging in questions surrounding the status of artistic labor amidst the so-called AI revolution.
As a mediation on process, Broad Picnic simultaneously prompts reflection on the status of abstraction today, following a recent surge of figurative painting. Certain artists leverage abstraction as conducive to material concerns, perhaps in resistance to the dematerializing tendencies of digitalization, without necessarily disavowing the inevitable influences of technological mediation. Broad Picnic effectively resists definitive characterization of abstraction today, instead bringing together diverse approaches to repetition as a fundamental premise of art-making. WM
Broad Picnic
Europa, New York
Through December 31, 2024
Aidan Chisholm is a writer and curator based in New York City. She focuses on contemporary art, with a particular interest in image-based practices, performance, and installation. Originally from California, she holds a M.A. from Columbia University, where her research concerned evolving practices of self-representation.
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