In an interview between art critic Jennifer Samet and artist Jake Berthot (1939–2014), Berthot reveals that he had a hardscrabble life. He grew up with his grandparents on a truck farm in central Pennsylvania. One work of art was in the house — a double-sided piece. On one side was a line drawing of the horse; on the other a Victorian print of the Last Supper. When he describes his attraction to the drawing, he asks rhetorically, “How could someone make you feel a drawing that is not there?” He cannot believe that you can make a drawing of a real-life subject without having it in front of you. His puzzlement about the relationship between form and absence, what is there and not there, haunted him his entire life.

During a career that began in the early 1970s, at the height of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Berthot doggedly examined the entanglement of materiality and immateriality in paintings and drawings. A notoriously slow painter, he could look at a small canvas every day and find something to add, cover, shift, or scrape away. Even after he abandoned abstraction and began painting gloomy landscapes, his preoccupation continued; despite the change, critic David Carrier observed, “Berthot’s late art [was] an exercise in small discriminations.”

That insistence on working slowly, on not striving for certainty, and on investigating the relationship between solidity and dissolution binds together all of the work in the exhibition Jake Berthot: What Happened To Abstraction?, at Betty Cuningham (February 2–April 15, 2023). Of the 20 paintings, all made between 1971 and 2014, half are abstractions dating from the 1970s and the other half are what the gallery press released termed “his late ‘tree/landscape’ paintings dating from 1996 to 2014.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.