Super Dakota

How 2 Paint draws attention to the contrast of technique and difference of approach found with these two painters and the push and pull caused by the parallels, or lack there of.
The show is assembled as a survey, informed by two distinctive contemplations on surface and image while examining two approaches which take their roots in the history of art.

Pernet’s group of restrained abstracts are muted and minimal with tight composition. Pernet restricts himself to a limited colour palette and focuses on repetition to form pieces which are both modest and opulent. The meticulous application of paint is bordered by raw canvas which adds a slide projector-like effect. In doing so, the artist questions our relationship to painting, and how we apprehend the medium through different intermediaries such as catalogues, screens, and photos. The restless abundance of images we are submerged into daily includes art images and paintings which we consume effortlessly and with no sense of texture, strokes, or scent. We lose the physical experience of a painting to a vague memory of attened aesthetic. Hugo Pernet creates window-like invitations, and it becomes left up to the viewer to complete the work by interacting with it.

Baptiste Caccia’s practice is centred on the reproduction and over-saturation of image. Through a series of repeated screen prints he floods the canvas with the reiteration of an image, each time making adjustments and adding gestural painterly elements. Caccia collects his original images from photographs taken of objects which have been unintentionally painted in a manner that resembles a gesture from an abstract painting. Through his process the artist constructs a mise en abîme, a painting within a painting within a painting, the multiplication of layers creates a large spectrum of possibilities that slowly appear within a series of works through the relentless transformation of the initial image. We are confronted with a personal discussion between the artist and his initial photograph, taking it far beyond comprehensive choices, into an ideal, a eld of vision.

At once a question and a statement, How 2 Paint is an arrangement for open observation into the process and form of the two artists. A painting is only a painting and its complexity is derived from both its source and reception.

“There is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint.” -Robert Ryman