terrain: a short detour

Although the focus of this blog is abstraction, I’ve chosen to post two artists this week for whom representational elements feature prominently in their work. Albert Ohlen and Michele Abeles arrange patterned fabric; printed words, numbers, or letters on paper; even images of disembodied torsos and limbs, amidst areas of vibrant color or harried squiggles of paint. The fact that we are dealing with objects--in the case of Abeles, almost exclusively--certainly makes us read the images differently than we would if they were completely non-objective. Yet because of the way the objects are deployed, they produce the kind of visuality that we associate with more traditional abstraction, based on vectors of energy, fields of texture and color, and marks from the artist's hand.

A second kind of abstraction results when these myriad objects, stripped of context and chosen, it seems, for their lack of cultural resonance, are made to exist in the same visual space as scumbled paint and bands of pure lavender. They end up registering on the same formal level as the more conventionally abstract features that accompany and sometimes obscure them. Language is reduced to visual texture, a bent limb to simply another kind of line. They don’t throw us back to the world of concepts the way an image of a gesticulating JFK or the word "blue" stenciled in red used to do. They are objects abstracted from meaning, free-floating signifiers signifying nothing but the impossibility of meaningful signification. What else is one to do with the amusingly ham-fisted rhyme of raw potatoes with male genitalia--the latter left teasingly out of the frame in one of Abeles' photographs?

albert ohlen

gucken-krone, 2004, oil, lacquer, inkjet print on canvas