Taking on the Wall: The art of Peter Adsett

TAKING ON THE WALL

The art of Peter Adsett

Fig.1

Fig.2

TAKING ON THE WALL

The art of Peter Adsett

In 2004, Melbourne painter, Peter Adsett, exhibited a series of six works with the provocative title Serial Killer. A glance at the series seems to give us the same painting with a few variants. This was deliberate, as Adsett explains: With SK I was concerned with the commodification of image and of painting, both as a spectacle and in the market. I set out to create a series that would place the viewer in a dilemma over what to look at, or choose. i

But as the title suggests, there was a lot more going on, and in the accompanying catalogue Adsett stated that his aim was to kill-off, by demonstration, various preconceptions about abstract painting. One of these was the idea that paintings are contained within their frames. As he said, The operation in my painting goes beyond the frame [ ] absorbing the surface of the wall. ii

In this regard his aims are shared with a number of abstract painters of recent times (although the tradition of painting’s relationship to architecture extends back as far as the de Stijl group.) Of Robert Ryman, for instance, Adsett observed: Ryman would be thinking about the wall as part of the medium, as it is a given in his paintings. [He] always considers the flatness and texture of the painted wall in relation to what he is fixing to it, be it paper, tape or stretched linen. I would say he sees [the wall] as an extension of his practice – even as a support. His attention to detail would be how he considers the wall, how he wants it painted. iii

Whereas Ryman does indeed incorporate such supposedly extraneous items (hooks and brackets, for example) into his work, Adsett’s interest ‘beyond the frame’ is more in the nature of the contextual space of his paintings: a space incorporating the entire architecture of the room, including the body that inhabits it.

Adsett began Serial Killer immediately on his return from a residency in the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. There he completed a series of eleven works entitled The Spoiler. These paintings comprised stark black and white abstracts, with sharp angles or wedges, a shape that would reappear in many subsequent series. Adsett discovered that a slippage of one square inside another (the frame), together with his habitual figure/ground opposition, upset our sense of gestalt. The paintings are spoilers because, depending on the directional thrust of the diagonals, the squares disobey the laws of gravity, and tilt upwards or lean sideways, in some cases setting up a rocking sensation.

The corollary of these experiments flowed directly into Serial Killer, resulting in the collapse of the concept of painting as a discrete object on the wall. A work that went “beyond the frame” absorbed the space of architectural container.

The six paintings of Serial Killer are, like Spoiler, identical in size and materials. Each one is a 122cm white square with black diagonal shapes. Actually, as with Spoiler, they are not pure black and white, but contain a specific quantity of diluted red, blue and white acrylic paint, scattered with dust and hairs fallen from the brush. The artist lists these items in lieu of titles, distinguishing the works simply by the addition of a number. iv

It is risky business for an abstract painter to adopt colour, since it carries so much figurative and symbolic allusion, but Adsett avoids this. His near-black and off-white partake of one another, producing a softer, warmer tonal contrast, which never falls into the optical illusion effect that can occur with alternating pure black and white. The tones are the result of a deliberate, laborious, mechanical technique. He works kneeling on the floor, layering paint in thin washes. The surface produced is unlike that of traditional easel painting: it is smooth, uninflected by brushstrokes, but has substance and weight (even the white!). It cannot be confused with a wall, however, because the studio debris and brush hair trapped in the paint remain, - a visible testament to the horizontal matrix of the creation.

Each linen square of Serial Killer is predominantly an off-white surface, slashed through with two blackish lines, joining at a sharp angle. Each line reaches, and wraps around, the stretched edge of the unframed support. These edges, as in all Adsett’s paintings, are painted as carefully as the surface so that the effect of the lines is maintained if a viewer is standing at a slight angle to the work. If we were looking for an image, the dark linear shape of No.1 [fig.1] calls to mind a thin blade piercing the surface, its perfect shadow shooting off at a right-angle.

The term used here is not fortuitous, but metonymic. Its slicing, cutting function is synonymous with a knifeedge.

The ambiguity of the ‘figures’ is exacerbated in No.2 [fig.2]. At first sight, one assumes this is simply a reversal of No.1, but a closer examination uncovers variants with implications that belie their subtlety. The lines here are nearly equal, which in turn, draws attention to the angled white areas that they separate. But instead of operating as lines (outlining a shape), they become cuts, recessed space, dropping behind the two white areas that must come forward to read as planes.

No.2 (and by extension, the other five paintings) now reads as an off- white surface, intersected by a blackish wedge that drops beneath an off- white, triangular shape that slides over it. Because of the integrity (the stable, compact uprightness) of the square format, this triangle must read as a white square tilting out of its axis, across the adjoining wall and onto the floor. Ultimately, the two white areas of paint are seen as different entities: if one is to remain static (ground), the other becomes dynamic (figure), and vice versa. This perceptual discontinuity is the necessary and intended outcome of extreme tonal contrast as Adsett deploys it.

The play of dark and light has been a constant in Adsett’s work for over two decades. Set into opposition, they formed one of the pre-eminent codes of historic painting: chiaroscuro. v In Serial Killer Adsett presents us with the code stripped back to its elements. But in so doing he creates a new function for chiaroscuro. The tonal balance in baroque painting had the purpose of underscoring the (usually moral) narrative, and as such remained subservient. But in Serial Killer, where images are absent or, at most, transitory, and the play of opposition is interminable, figure- ground shift gives rise to a space that Adsett identifies as unique to painting and worthy of a lifetime’s labour.

Further interesting things come into focus as we compare each painting with its neighbour. In no other painting but No.1, for example, does a black line intersect the corner of the frame. Here, in the top right corner, it culminates in a black point, like a necktie. So strong is this image, that it challenges the possibility of the ‘blade and shadow’ reading I rehearsed above. That line was a downward thrust, whereas the necktie point signals an upward trajectory that disappears beyond the top right corner.

In each painting, as we steady the image, it shifts again, and the black under-space, the ‘beneath’ of the painting, leaps into focus, while the new white triangle cutting into it tips over, and seems to fall backward out of the framing edge. One can almost hear it groaning like a toppling iceberg.

This is a figure/ground shift with a vengeance. It entails certain violence both as figure (which is “killed-off”) and as non-figure (doing injury to perception and to balance). No shape ever steadies: black sinks cavernously back behind an imaginary wall, only to reassert itself as a slash of black on white. Meanwhile, the white surfaces within the frame adopt two distinct personalities (at least), refusing to operate in the same way spatially. The diagonal thrusts of both the lines and rectangles appear to obey a gravitational pull, downward to the floor, to the place where the viewer stands, but also up to the ceiling and sideways to the walls.

The viewer, according to Adsett, always desires control over what he or she looks at in a work of art – a mirror image of our upright stance. And control is usually supplied by the presence of an identifiable figure on an unambiguous ground, staying inside the framing border. By denying these comfortable certainties, Serial Killer is subversive, as was certainly its intent.

I am [said Adsett] attacking the gallery wall, its meaning, the ultimate meaning of architecture as symbolic of reason.vi

In 2010, Adsett was given the opportunity to paint on the wall in a group show entitled Taint at First Draft Gallery in Sydney [fig. 3]. He said that for this show, his aim was to “re-present” one of the Serial Killer paintings.

Evidently the commodification of art was under attack here too, since he was very much aware that in three weeks the same roller that made the work would erase it for ever.

What the artist meant by “representing” a painting is complex, because Taint was not simply a reproduction of one of the six canvasses in three dimensions, nor an exercise in converting painting into sculpture. Instead, Taint offered a demonstration of the fundamental principle that his paintings “take on the wall.”

For this writer, however, they take on more, refusing as they do, to conform to a recognised medium such as fresco, or interior decoration. Site-specific is the most appropriate label, if by this we mean something that cannot be detached and framed as a separate composition. But that statement has to be reconciled with the fact that Taint derived from the canvasses of Serial Killer.

The fact is that all of the Serial Killer paintings are site-specific, or architecture-specific, insofar as they require the white, four-sided wall in order to operate fully. The orthogonals of the square format reference the gallery wall, as in all modernist abstract painting. Further, each of the internal lines and planes respond to the framing edge. Sections of a square-within-a-square, their rise and fall is determined by the direction of the black angles that separate them.

This aspect transferred to Taint, expanded into three-dimensions. With the incorporation of a second wall at right angles to the first, making a corner, it became possible to engage perception as both embodied, and peripatetic. The viewer has to turn around, approach, recede, and try out sight lines to engage with this work. With his slashing diagonals Adsett displaced and subverted the stable lines of architecture, so that perception cannot but be correspondingly affected. If Richard Serra wanted, in his wall drawings, to bring aspects of architecture to the viewer’s “critical attention,” Adsett seems more intent on throwing us off balance entirely.

Adjustments were made to respond to the box-like space and the much bigger scale of the First Draft Gallery.

Adsett abandoned the layering method that accompanied his horizontal Serial Killer paintings and adopted the stance of a painter-decorator, limiting his materials to Resene black and Gallery white, masking tape, rollers and a ladder.

The black lines now traverse walls instead of linen squares made to hang on walls. For this reason, the possibility of image that exists in the series can have no logical place. Furthermore, along with diagonals, Taint has horizontal lines forming the boundary between wall and floor, and seeming to reinforce the structure of interior architecture. These lines are not painted, however, but real shadows cast on the floor under the floating walls, which were erected several centimetres out from the internal walls of the gallery. Determined that the line of shadow could also masquerade as solid paint, Adsett painted the rear gallery walls black. The zig-zag effect of the lines in Taint is thus created partly by paint and partly by shadow. Once a viewer realises that the walls are undercut by real space, a murky interior region is evoked, one that infects all the black lines. Considering the work in totality, we cannot help but muse on the difference between a line and a cut. If that question remained implicit in Serial Killer, in the space of architecture it becomes explicit.

Of course, our first reaction to Taint is a sort of wry humour, occasioned by the wit of throwing the left wall onto a 45-degree angle so that it ‘penetrates’ the contiguous upright wall. The humour is heightened when we realise that Adsett has not, in fact, painted the left-hand wall, only the right.

And yet he has managed to hijack the left wall in its entirety! This is achieved with the long diagonal that sweeps in from the top left junction of the two walls, obliterating their vertical union.

If some of Adsett’s paintings (particularly Spoiler and Two Laws) appear to have a certain formal kinship with the wall drawings of Richard Serra, this is because both artists are ultimately concerned with the displacement of architectural intention. Of his earlier wall drawings, done soon after the sculptures “Strike” and “Circuit” of 1972, Serra said: “I did not want to accept architectural space as a limiting container. I wanted it to be understood as a site in which to establish and structure disjunctive, contradictory spaces.” vii Nevertheless, Serra’s drawings remain flat, flush with the wall, avoiding all illusion of three- dimensionality, like silhouettes of his steel sculptures.

Of greater relevance in the present context were the problems raised by Theo van Doesburg and de Stijl painters and architects in the 1920s. In the design for a ceiling in the University Hall (1921-3), and the interior of the Café Aubette (1928) van Doesburg was attempting to integrate painting and architecture. This was an aim shared by Mondrian, when he set up flat painted squares on his studio walls - producing one of the earliest site-specific installations. Their responses to the problem were dramatically different, however, Mondrian never accepting diagonal lines because of their capacity for flight beyond the frame, whilst van Doesburg embraced them whole-heartedly precisely for this property, which allowed him to camouflage the box-shape of the room.

I asked Adsett about van Doesburg’s experiments when preparing this article, and he replied: By moving beyond the frame, he [van D] enabled the wall to be complicit in the event – working against Mondrian’s integration of painting. The oblique allows painting’s integration with architecture by activating the wall [ ] The obliques of Taint address the corner of two vertical walls. The operation of figure and ground is integrated in the architecture by responding to the site, the black recesses on top and below the walls. As we spin, the viewer will create alternative perspectives, depending on their will. viii

A viewer confronting Taint will try to put the work into perspective. But ultimately it is the viewer put into perspective, since there is no one place, no ideal view. If the de Stijl painters, followed much later by the Minimalists, made the viewer the subject of the abstract interior, Adsett is taking up the challenge, making us complicit in the redefinition of painting’s relationship to the wall. ix

Mary Alice Lee

i Conversation with the artist, March 2014. He continued: “What could possibly be the difference between that painting or this one? In addition, is this one work, or six separate works? Either way it puts the viewer in a quandary.” ii Catalogue of Serial Killer, Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney 2004 (Adsett interviewed by Tia Blassingame, editor of New York Arts Magazine). The series was painted at the McDowell Colony, USA, during a residency. iii Note to the author, February 2014. iv The materials are listed as “1 litre of red, 250ml of blue, 180ml of white, brush hair, water and urine.” v The paintings of Caravaggio and Rembrandt best exemplify this technique. vi Idem. vii Richard Serra, “Notes on Drawing,” in Hans Janssen (ed.) Richard Serra, Drawings; Zeichnungen 1969-1990, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, and Benteli Verlag, Bern 1990, p.8. viii Note to the author, March 2014. ix Adsett’s most recent painting will be exhibited at the Melbourne Art Fair in August 2014 under the title Room with a View. The new work will continue his investigations into the relationship between painting and interior architecture.

PAULNACHE

Upstairs 89 Grey Street Gisborne 4010 New Zealand Wed–Fri 10–5, Sat 10–2 now@paulnache.com http://www.paulnache.com/ +64 6 867 9721 Artist: Peter Adsett Writer: Mary Alice Lee Fig.1, «Painting No.1» Fig.2, «Painting No.2» Year: 2004 Medium: horizontality Material: acrylic on canvas [1 litre of red paint, 250ml of blue, 180ml of white, brush hair, water and urine] Sizes: 122 × 122cm each Serial Killer series Fig.3, «Taint» (cover), wall painting installation at Firstdraft Space, Sydney, Australia. Curated by Claire Lewis