MICHAEL BAUER – SLOW FUTURE-H.S.O.P.-OPUS
2013-03-11Bauer loves titles – the more deliberately obscure and diverse the better – and this series is no exception. The ‘slow’ of Slow Future refers to his pace in working, building layer upon layer, organically but never systematically, and because one of the things Bauer has always valued about painting is that it’s slower than other media.H.S.O.P. is an acronym for the Hudson River School of painting – a 19th century fraternity of American landscape painters who hold no significance for Bauer other than the fact that they’ve become unfashionable and he likes the idea of “colonizing their memory”. He fundamentally disagrees with the notion that painting itself has become obsolete and, by annexing a school devoted to it, seeks to re-emphasize that painting remains not only central to his future, but to the future. Opus is a typically self-deprecating Bauer addendum, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the fact that he doesn’t see this or any other of his series as fitting into an ordered theory or composition.
Bauer usually adds some kind of coding system to his paintings’ surfaces, alluding to a faux structure at each of their premises. These have recently taken the form of colour-coded punctuation, but in most of the paintings here the only graphic notation he uses are deliberate red herrings: Bauer has painted small flags in their corners, chosen not because of any personal geographic or historical relevance, but because they are from lesser-known nations that he didn’t recognise and are often confused with more prominent countries. What’s particularly appealing to Bauer is that any flag, known or unknown, carries so much invented history. So, in addition to these being framing devices or heraldic elements for each painting, he wants them to function as “traps of meaning” in the context of all the other clues in the works.
Opposite – Slow Future – Skoer, 2012
Exhibition runs through to March 28th, 2013
Alison Jacques Gallery
16 – 18 Berners Street
London
W1T 3LN
