Not A Painting

The Hole is proud to announce a group show of wall works that are contingent upon painting, or refer to painting, or negate painting; but are not paintings.

"Not A Painting" is an exhibit of emerging artists who make what cannot literally be called paintings. With an expansive array of materials they construct artworks that hang on the wall and have the logic of a painting but that do not use paint on canvas.

Evan Robarts uses a weathered chain link fence as his canvas and places found colored balls where he would otherwise want to apply paint. Martha Friedman casts colored rubber to make what looks like a slice of pimento loaf stuck to the wall; the rectilinear format makes us look at the pimento placement as "composition" and the scale shift from tiny to huge loaf lends itself to looking at lunchmeat as landscape.

Adam Parker Smith, in two unavoidable pieces, weaves the tackiest and fakest materials (and handmade imitations thereof) through a retail-looking metal rack armature hung on the wall. The positioning of these materials amidst and throughout the armature creates depth but also color, energy and motion; content, narrative, all the things we bring as viewers to a traditional painting, but here in an ersatz way.

In fact all the works here tempt us to approach them and read them as paintings, but all somehow confound us. Bob Eikelboom composes his painting with magnets, Evie Falci with rhinestones, Gabriel Pionkowski woven with painted threads. Nick Theobald's luminous compositions are created by wax and Will Stewart's with glue. Juni Figueroa arranges clothes in a white window blind system to create a very memorable send up of "high art", specifically abstract painting, with this "tropical readymade."

Many young artists feel pressure from the market to make paintings whereas they otherwise would pursue more difficult and odd territory. I wanted to organize a show that celebrated the artworks that exist in this more problematic zone of "wall works"; challenging and painterly pieces that, if on the floor, might be called a sculpture, but ultimately resist the pressure to be paintings.