Vincent Vulsma

Vincent Vulsma’s series of paintings ARS NOVA E5305-B takes its title from a product name for canvases in the art supplies trade. Vulsma exhibits these standard 80 x 100 cm canvases without so much as unpacking them. Instead, he sprays their shrink-film packaging with black paint. The wet film expands to produce folds beyond the artist’s control. He then sprays the folds white. When the shrink film dries again and contracts it produces a trompe-l’oeil effect, an illusion of three-dimensionality, which is not entirely baseless: it is the true afterimage of an intermediary state produced by chance and chemistry. Every picture bears its own traces, including seams that sometimes cross the shrink-film packaging.

The canvas here neither transports contents nor contentlessness. Present as a space of potentiality, yet it is mystically distant, swathed, muted. The thirteen shrink-film pictures have an elevated beauty and haptic magic like fabrics in the paintings of Baroque old masters. Each could pass as a perfect work of art on its own. As a series of solo-exhibition format, however, they draw attention to the material, its meaning and conditions of origin. The canvases come from China, which reminds one that today, economically speaking, the globe is as flat as a canvas. The tradition of the easel painting has broken down into an industrial mass product—in black, the negative sum of all colors. At the same time, the concealment suggests hidden secrets and lends the paintings an aura of the transitory.

In 1915 Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square proclaimed the end of figurative painting. Ironically broken, this pathos of the new sounds in the title ARS NOVA E5305-B. Vulsma thus confidently positions himself in the tradition of the avant-gardes. For his finals project at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam he exhibited air ducts he cut from a new extension at the academy, à la Michael Asher’s interventions. For the Berlin Biennial he intriguingly interrelates contexts, presenting the paintings and the gallery walls they were first displayed on. So the work exhibits not only its history, but the history of its inscription into the art market as well. The white cube, designed to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of art, is deconstructed and rendered negotiable, and with it the architectural, social, and economic realities that constitute the work as a work of art.

If abstract art transcended painting, Vincent Vulsma transcends abstraction. His work simply reflects back the demand that art negotiate reality. All that shows through the black surface is what was previously hidden there.

Translation: Christopher Jenkin-Jones