The suite of five monumental abstractions gathered together in "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Action Painting, Crash! Vanishing Point," represent altered photographic documents of a pair of Vladimir Umanetz's Ongoing Paintings—works that owe much of their compositional sensibility to Abstract Expressionism, yet whose permanently changing surfaces irrevocably revise that lineage's premise of the painting as archive of a specific and finite historical performance of gesture. The open temporality that the series' title suggests invites us to view each of these self-derivative works as "states," records of an Ongoing Painting at a given moment—and yet the photographs of Ongoing Paintings on which these works are based have themselves been altered, made generative, and possess as unpredictable a degree of visual fidelity to their source as the Ongoing Paintings themselves have to their prior iterations. Neither gesture nor archive is what it seems, and a viewer's eNort to stabilize their roles has the effect of producing vertigo.

These works are transfer prints—impressions of laser-printed sheets of paper gridded edge to edge—a technique by which one image passes into another through a medium with potent bureaucratic associations in the form of paper bills and government record-keeping, which nonetheless ordinarily pass without comment among art observers. Here, however, the specific collective function of the humble A4 printout, to register a kind of visual report on the activity of something in the background of our awareness—not to mention the artist's own origin in an intricately bureaucratic, now collapsed political state— accentuates the presence of what art historian Benjamin Buchloh, with reference to conceptual art, has called an "aesthetic of administration." The artist is figured less as the traditional heroic originator of expressive gesture and more as a meticulous record-keeper going about his business; at the moment the tidy traces of his paper rectangles meet our gaze, his purpose may appear as abstract as that of any clerk of the administrative state. And yet the records stewarded by this apparent chromatic apparatchik are paradoxically the product of past states of the artist himself.

Further complicating matters, the searing orange, pink, blue, red, and green of these untitled pieces (all 2024) are, in bureaucratic terms, bad records—digitally manipulated to a point they no longer empirically resemble their originals and are barely detectable as having the same two paintings as source material among the five of them. Their color noise and dilated pixels call to mind "corrupted files" whose layered glitching assumes the role of painterly mark-making. Meanwhile, scrutiny reveals the subjects of these distorted documents to have origins in AI and appropriated fragments from Hollywood. As gesture and system mutually reframe and destabilize each other, the paintings' combination of wild, looping, borrowed forms so reminiscent of the free hand of traditional AbEx with a dispassionately executed, self-imposed, corrupted organizational system makes "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Action Painting, Crash! Vanishing Point" a work of supremely mixed feelings. And yet its hall of mirrors is in the end not so unfamiliar to subjects structurally divided between the "experiencing self" of phenomenology and the "observing self" of analysis. But what are these opposed, mutually contaminating selves bringing forth together here, in the Ongoing Paintings as rendered in a proliferation of expressive documents?

Perhaps the bewildering multiplicity is, like the dual frame of gesture and system, person and state, aimed at visualizing something more familiar, even structurally innate to our experience of images. Art historian David Joselit touches this vertigo when he writes: "Here is a strange fact, which is both so obvious and so threatening to art-historical analysis that it is habitually overlooked: every artwork is indescribable. And since we can neither grasp a painting in language nor exhaust it in experience, how can we assign it a meaning?" As anyone who has tried to write about art knows, the eNort to pin a determinative topical meaning on the inexhaustible swarm of an abstract painting feels, and is, an arbitrary improvisation at best and at worst disingenuous. Not only is our experience more like a sequence of highly diNerential states than a faithful copy, but we stand in changing light and on moving ground such that the object of our attention never remains itself. As if proposing that every painting is ongoing, Joselit concludes: "Indeed, the value of modern painting lies not in its meanings or even its actions, but rather in its unlimited potential for staging meanings and actions."

Abraham Adams
November 2024