Jan van der Ploeg WALL PAINTING No. 288 (2010) (2010)
acrylic on wall
site specific installation
Peloton
"Jan van der Ploeg WALLPAINTING No. 288 (2010)" at Peloton is the first solo exhibition by young Sydney artist Adrian Gebers. The show was conceived by Gebers, and the work executed from a design by van der Ploeg, as a site specific wall painting.
Amsterdam artist Jan van der Ploeg has been executing wall paintings for the past two decades. The works always display an avoidance of the obvious signs of "painting"by taping and rolling the design flat, directly onto the wall. This practical objectivity means that another artist organising and installing the artwork can extend the individual process.
Gebers' work blurs the boundary between artist, curator and assistant. All are facilitators of the artwork but here the order of things has been reversed.
Finally the work could also be classified as a portrait of a senior fellow artist who's person is visualised through his wall paintings. More than just appropriation the work functions as a homage to the relationship between artists working in the international realm.
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Although I’ve not yet had one, I expect most artists preparing their first solo exhibition would be occupied in a quandary of curatorial deliberations mixed in with a cacophony of nerves about what people will think of their work (and indirectly, them). For Adrian Gebers’ first solo exhibition, I suspect he was mostly occupied with concerns of what one internationally renowned artist, Jan Van Der Ploeg, would think. Jan Van Der Ploeg WALL PAINTING No.288 (2010) is a mesmerising site specific wall painting executed by Gebers but designed by Amsterdam-based Van Der Ploeg. Using a basic elemental tonal contrast of black/white, Gebers has painted black, right-pointing, wall-sized arrows, on the white surface of Peloton 19’s four-walled gallery. Directing the viewer around the space in a clockwise direction (bar the left-pointing arrows in the window which point you into the gallery), it seems unnatural to roam the space in an anti-clockwise direction and it’s interesting to note how many viewers obey this rule instinctively.This work is not interested in human perception or response but there’s no question of the presence or absence of form or tone. It is clear that black has been painted on the white, but what is so enigmatic about this wall painting is how all-encompassing it is. Your visual field is engrossed not just with the stark black and white of the walls but also their reflection in the gallery’s black polished floor, made all the more impressive by the sharp, hard lines Gebers has created for each triangle. This sharpness draws you closely in to examine them, only to make you retract again to the middle of the room to enjoy the forms in their entirety. They appear so precisely straight they would give Friedensreich Hundertwasser something to argue about. Despite how engrossing the wall paintings are, they’re not the most impressive element of Jan Van Der Ploeg WALL PAINTING No.288 (2010). It’s a title more arbitrary than [untitled] which you see all over galleries and it seems no more a summation of the work than a catalogue number for a database. No, more intriguing, is the fact that Gebers – the artist that painted the work, was merely following instructions and designs by Van Der Ploeg. This leads to a central question – who is the author and creator of Jan Van Der Ploeg WALL PAINTING No.288 (2010)? The work wouldn’t exist if Van Der Ploeg didn’t design it, but no more would it exist if Gebers didn’t paint it. This question of authorship is by no means original but in this ever-growing environment of globalised mass production it is still supremely relevant. What is so impressive about Gebers’ Jan Van Der Ploeg WALL PAINTING No.288, is how acutely the work poses this question of authorship. Here is an artist more concerned with the structural concepts and ‘rules’ of contemporary art, rather than the avant and oblique ‘isms’ (symbolism, minimalism and post, post-modernism and the like) that other artists entangle their work in. It is the directness of this work that allows such discourse to evolve. I’m looking forward to seeing which international artist’s opinion Gebers will have to worry about for his second solo exhibition.
Nell Greco
