Cut Paper 2007

The Cut Paper series presents a body of work that continues
my investigation into the facts and illusions of abstraction.
While my past work used various types and treatments of transparent
film to track down new spins on the old Modernist “problems” of figure
and ground, I have here ventured to bring the same kind of analysis
to bear on the humble sheet of paper. Descended from the slashed
canvases of Lucio Fontana’s “Concetti Spaziali” and Don Judd’s wall
mounted sculpture, these pieces play with similar ideas of the pictorial
and actual. And as we can’t quite call Fontana’s work ‘oil on canvas’,
nor Judd’s simply ‘sculpture’, identifying these pieces as work on paper
is convenient but ostensibly misleading, for they are much more.
The sheet of paper here is no mere support, but a platform.

The graphics that hold the plane, primarily minimal grids and serial
squares, are partially cut away, creating apertures in the supporting
paper, into which I have fixed walled cavities constructed of similarly
painted surfaces or, recalling Judd’s repertoire of materials, brass,
copper and aluminum. The subtle variations in spatial relief, and often
ambiguous play of light, elicits a physical movement in the viewer that
cites a space far more extensive than the small scale of this work
would at first suggest.

Unlike Fontana’s gesture of the knife splitting the canvas, my treatment
of the paper approaches a surgical precision, an exacting cut in the
material alligned to the composition with a care akin to Judd’s standard
of fabrication. And, in a corresponding departure, the relatively small
scale and concentrated intimacy of my work breaks with the often
grand theatricality of Judd’s installations

My work nevertheless keeps faith with Modernism and its project
to disclose the materiality of its means -- to make work grounded
in the empirical, but also uncanny in its simplicity.