JOHN HENDERSON – RE-ER
2017-09-11John Henderson’s oeuvre has long revolved around the problematic of modernism, abstraction, and the painterly gesture. In this sense, he could possibly be situated in the context of a larger wave of process based abstraction in recent years, one that is marked by the flatness of the picture plane, a preoccupation with process, and improvised gestures indexing the real. As the critic David Geers has argued, this trend is “in equal parts, a generational fatigue with theory; a growing split between hand-made artistic production and social practice; and a legitimate and thrifty attempt to ‘keep it real’ in the face of an ever-expansive image culture and slick ‘commodity art’.
Yet what sets Henderson apart is his reflexive distance to the painterly, putting the romance of the authorial gesture and the assumption of an unproblematic spectatorship into question. On the one hand, the artist admits the performative element to his work, but on the other, he problematizes it by “translations”, “documentations”, and erasures. Understanding painting as performance is, of course, nothing new. Since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, when the critic Harold Rosenberg declared that henceforth paintings would be “an arena in which to act… What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event”, the performative gesture in painting has been a guarantee of presence. In the present age, this guarantee of presence also firms up the value of painting in the face of digital and new media incursions.
Opposite – Reticle (model 06), 2017
Exhibition runs from September 7th through to November 7th, 2017
Perrotin
17th Floor, 50 Connaught Road, Central
Hong Kong
China
