Painting Stripped Bare

In his 2007 exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Josh Smith put aside for a moment works that had become his signature pieces. Until then, his paintings occupied three main categories: the Name Paintings, integrating the writing of the artist’s own name; the Announcement Paintings, on which he screenprinted hand-written posters for his shows; and the Collages, composed of various printed materials, from self-made exhibition flyers to take-out menus, pasted on plywood and sometimes painted over. Some absurd purpose appeared to condition each of these series: Why would a painting shout the name of its creator or announce a show to visitors already present? But the pictures in “Abstraction” did not pretend to any such purpose. No Name Paintings, Announcement Paintings, or Collages were to be found, but instead, abstract canvases in two sizes, 60 x 48 and 20 x 16 inches, at first sight devoid of any function or subject matter.

Smith’s show presented over forty colorful abstract paintings of identical format hung on the same level around the gallery’s two main rooms. In the entrance and the corridor separating the exhibition spaces, the artist added a number of smaller canvases, similarly hung in a line. This latter group, christened the Palette Paintings, was begun a couple of years before the Luhring Augustine show and seemed to occupy a more anecdotal position due to their size and mode of fabrication. Smith notes, “Usually, in my head, J call them ‘brush-cleaning paintings.’ I’ll have an empty canvas, and if I have a brush that’s loaded, I’ll just put it on there and use it.” The Palette Paintings were as abstract and colorful as the larger works in the show, but exclusively made of energetic spots of paint applied next to each other. The paintings’ vitality was solely generated by the artist’s working process. Smith explained to art critic Achim Hochdörfer recently, “The idea of Expressionism completely embarrasses me... And if things do come out... things that you define as being expressive or something... it happens because it is a by-product of a process, it’s not a direct expression. All the expression has been put through a filter, an ‘expression filter,’ so it comes out in a logical way. It’s not just pure and free but somehow justified and logical. Somehow the Palette Paintings look expressive but they are by-products of another painting.”

Most of the larger paintings in “Abstraction” comprised thick black lines—sometimes curved, sometimes angular—interlaced on surfaces made of interlocked round-edged shapes of three or four colors. In these works, two systems coexist without one dominating the other, thus avoiding any type of foreground/background relationship. Smith explained this relationship in the exhibition catalogue: “The abstract paintings are a mix between the palettes and my name paintings; the structure of the name paintings combined with the more colorful randomness of the palettes, When I was working on these paintings I tried to just walk that line.” The Abstract Paintings are not abstract in the sense of being expressive without resorting to figuration; they are instead abstractions of Smith’s own past work. The lines that composed the letters of his name or the announcements to his shows are set free from the alphabetical structure, just as the spots of mixed colors merge with each other and no longer stand in for the artist’s palette. It was striking then that a visitor to Luhring Augustine had to first pass the poster for the show, drawn by Smith, then a row of Palette Paintings, before entering the main rooms of the exhibition, unaware that these first pictures had somehow fed upon each other to create the Abstract Paintings.

Shortly after the opening, a magazine review stated with disapproval, “It’s only April, but there are forty-two good-sized canvases in Smith’s show, and they all bare the date 2007.” The writer obviously did not know that Smith had made many more. On April 17, the artist replaced the paintings in his exhibition with other similar works executed during the same period, so that a visitor coming early or late in April would see the same exhibition but different works. In conversation, Smith explains it as a form of generosity: why artificially rarity his production or deny that his working methods lead to a large number of works? Indeed, his production appears to be exponential. Each painting or poster is automatically recycled into the whole, continuing to generate new pictures over the years. In the artist’s economy, nothing ever seems to get lost.

Smith’s entire process grew out of almost nothing: “An exaggerated American name... like a pseudonym...[that] Europeans say with a smile.” Smith used his name in his work as others before him used the ready-made—a found object that could be collaged onto his paintings. The Name Paintings could be Smith’s only original gesture (while the Announcement Paintings, for instance, have clear precedents, I cannot recall any artist who produced an entire body of work on this single idea. These paintings set off a snowball effect, allowing the work to drag along everything it encountered and to gain its autonomy by constantly cannibalizing its own production. For instance, shortly after the Luhring Augustine show, Smith decided to publish, in a facsimile edition,” the gallery sign-in book, traditionally used in New York galleries to collect visitors’ names during an exhibition, both as an alternative catalogue of his show and a mirror image of his own Name Paintings.

In February 2009, Smith opened another exhibition at Luhring Augustine in many ways similar to “Abstraction,” but in others radically different. As in the 2007 show, “Currents”’—whose title was borrowed from Robert Rauschenberg’s fifty-four-foot screenprint of newspaper collages—presented paintings hung on one line around the gallery’s two main rooms; the other spaces were left empty. In what seemed an even tighter presentation, the works juxtaposed mixed paintings on canvas and collages on plywood without directly resorting to Smith’s habitual categories. Smith’s vocabulary had expanded, now including figurative motifs (a leaf with worm holes and a fish with human eyes) and a greater variety of pasted materials (proof sheets of his current catalogues and newspaper pages, for example), while his compositions had become more gestural. The catalogue published on the occasion of the show reproduces more than six hundred works made in less than a year. There, the artist explains that some of the panels were covered with images, usually of his own work, created with a digital camera and a laser printer.” In his new paintings, Smith made use of the capacity of any basic software to divide an image into sections that can be printed separately on letter-sized pages in order to recompose, for instance, a large picture in its original format. With this method, aiming at creating backgrounds for new paintings, the artist literally turned his past paintings into collages. Looking at the show produced an almost overwhelming effect, as the work seemed literally to duplicate itself. The process went full circle indeed: paintings had been photographed, photographs printed, prints collaged, collages painted over, and paintings photographed—only to emerge stronger each time.