Exhibition: Paul Sietsema

Three square telephone paintings are among the new canvases. In his largest example to date of such a work, Sietsema presents a rotary phone covered in silver, its handset lying off the hook. Previously, he has discussed the tableau depicted in his phone paintings as ambiguous, one that can be read as suggesting either an open or closed line of communication, but this new work seems to offer a more definitive view, as the phone’s plug rests in a corner of the composition, disconnected from any outside line.

A second silver painting executed in enamel on linen presents a broken vinyl record, its shattered pieces coated in the same material used to reproduce it. The paint appears to have been poured over the vinyl shards quickly and recently, as groups of small air bubbles and the remnants of larger, newly collapsed bubbles are evident on its surface. Just as a disconnected line and layer of paint have made the silver telephone useless, the doubly ruined record now exists as a mute object to be appreciated for its formal and material qualities as well as its resonances with artistic movements of the past.

Three small works reproduce covers of The New Yorker magazine. The artwork and other details of the covers, such as the issue date or price, have been subtly altered, and coins painted to match the illustrations’ colors have been laid on top of the periodicals. Like the vinyl record, magazines were once the dominant means of disseminating certain kinds of cultural information on a mass scale, themselves objects that circulated throughout the world along with the sounds or words and pictures they contained, but the technological shifts of the internet age have greatly diminished the production and consumption of both types of physical media.

In another group of paintings, Sietsema continues his use of found canvases, wrapping a trio of abstract compositions with imagery of torn Swiss, Turkish or European currencies. On the face of a fourth found painting, a large dull golden field surrounded by a thin white border and marked with a thick red line that describes a slightly rounded rectangular shape, he has returned to a motif that has occupied him throughout his career, the tools of an artist, with the addition of a large flat paint brush soaked in a pool of red paint. Sietsema originally photographed the brush more than a decade ago and has continued to use the same image file in a series of paintings. Within the added red paint, he has carefully rendered digital artifacting, a kind of image degradation typically associated with the low resolution produced by outdated imaging devices or a loss of information due to repeated compression as a file is transmitted across storage devices or computer networks.

Paul Sietsema (b. 1968) lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Kunsthalle Basel, among others.