Abstract Repetition: “Broad Picnic” at Europa, New York

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.

Peter Davies, That Moment, 2024. Acrylic and pencil on canvas. 16 x 14 inches.

Installation view. Left: Miles Huston, Verse #5, 2024. Colored pencil on museum board, artist
frame and stand. 31 x 31 inches. Right: Michael Andrew Page, Bivvy 15, 2023. Oil on linen
47.25 x 32 inches.