Modernist geometric abstraction insisted on art’s presentness, proscribing memory, illusion, allusion – anything that pointed beyond the frame. During the early 2000s, several artists emerged, among them Martin Boyce, Sergej Jensen, David Maljkovic and Katja Strunz, who saw ironic potential in turning this bias on its head, using formalism to retrospectively allude to the absolutist claims – of transcendence and finality – that modernist artists had made for it. Tomma Abts is among the most distinguished survivors of that generation, but she has never been an ironist. She proceeds as if earnest persistence could overcome the nostalgia to which her paintings seem condemned, and, failing that, elegiacally acquiesce to the obsolescence of the languages they draw on.
Abts’s paintings are puzzles, literally and metaphorically: literally because they might be examples of what W.H. Auden called art as a ‘contraption’ (he first approached a poem by asking, ‘How does it work?’). An Abts painting comes right ‘with a click like a closing box’ – as another great modernist, W.B. Yeats, described finishing a poem – resolving mechanism into image. But these are oddly purposeless illusions, picturing nothing but their own structures, their forms hermetically contingent on each other, committed to perpetual motion among themselves. Abts’s meticulous layering of hard-edged planes of colour fetishises her painstakingness, but the illusionism towards which it strives is self-concealing: the real time of painting gives way to the figurative time of an image’s retrospection, by sinking into the shallowest of pictorial spaces. This sleight of hand is what traditional painting has always used its imagery for; it only seems paradoxical here because it is so exclusively self-reflexive. Repeatedly, Abts bets everything on this spartan payoff. She is ultimately unlike the modernists she alludes to, who sought to supplant late-nineteenth-century aestheticism. For them, an emphasis on the artwork as a contraption was a vigorously realist alternative to a moribund formalism that had lost contact with life. Abts’s art has the pure aestheticism of the arcanely artisanal, the skill no one else has the patience to master. This is l’art pour l’art – like Fabergé eggs, or Flemish still lifes, but without the bonus of luscious fruit and flowers.