This is Not a Wall Label
Inchoate notes on Nature Morte
Roger Boyce & Marie-Claire Brehaut
…The P-lab (Ice-Lab in Australia, Meth-Lab in the USA) set up is in essence a false-front fabricated to convincingly persuade the eye of its veracity (it did a thorough enough job recently that a ‘good citizen’ called in an investigative hazmat team) but the representational painting (like a revealing camera) undoes even the most persuasive simulacra’s convincement…in our case by reducing a squalid and toxic clandestine lab into a conventionally (painting and subject) ordered and harmless still-life. We are reminded of William Wegman’s unforgettably deft pencil-line drawing of a rudimentarily bisected snake titled (if memory serves….A Dangerous Snake Rendered Harmless.
The Nature Morte tableau, like the majority of historical tableaus, calls on excess as a defining visual characteristic. Crowded with retinal-jostling visual information in each of its three elements – lab, painting, and painter’s equipped taboret, each major part of the tripartite set-up is visually reverberant of the other – further contributing to its sense of surplus visual value.
Nature Morte could be accurately described as a figurative work in that the human figure is (as in the Jack Pierson’s forlorn set constructions) made significant by its absence. The painting station and the P-lab itself look to have been momentarily stepped away from. The return of a live figure seems immanent – made so by the presence of in-process tasks and their evidencing apparatus.
Nature Morte opens at the Physics Room om March 9 and at Blue Oyster Dunedin on August 10.