The Green Gallery East is pleased to present new silverpoint drawings by Michelle Grabner with a mobile by Brad Killam. Michelle Grabner's paintings and silverpoints index the essentialism of time. Created with lines, marks, ticks, points, and dots Grabner's compositions are simply organized, accumulated, and sequenced, thus leaving virtually no space for the imagination or invention. There is nothing signified or expressed - nothing to be interpreted - only a methodical indication or trace of time's passage. Directing attention away from associations and referents toward formal concerns. Grabner's works underscore the poetics of constraints and sameness:
With absolute conviction I believe and practice Ad Reinhardt's thesis put forth in Extreme Routine. "One paints when there is nothing else to do," he writes. For Painting to be Painting — elemental visual vocabulary and meter unique to the language — everything else has to be "taken care of." It is a responsibility and privilege to work within its conditions. Painting is not Painting when it props up the self or attempts to tell stories. That activity is called picturemaking. Painting is larger than pictures but not larger than its limitations which are severe and singular and sweet. - Michelle Grabner
Beginning March 14th “Silverpoint Drawings with Guest Mobile" will be showing at The Green Gallery on Milwaukee's Eastside. The silverpoints are a continuation of Grabner's conviction and practice but utilize a new process using a metalpoint:
“Metal point, descendant of the stylus of classical times and ancestor of the modern pencil, a small sharpened metal rod used for drawing precise compositions on paper or parchment. The metal could be lead, silver, copper, or gold, but silverpoint was the most common choice because it is the most suited to permanent drawing, its stroke adhering unerasably. The silverpoint was of great value in producing the hard, clearly, defined line required, for instance, by miniaturists; modelling, emphasis, and light phenomena, however, had to be rendered either by means of repetitions, dense hatching, or blanks or else supplemented by other mediums.” - Encyclopedia Britannica
ROUTINE EXTREMISM
Ad Reinhardt
One paints when there is nothing else to do. After everything else is done, has been “taken care of,”one can take up the brush
After all the human, social physical needs, pressures have been accounted for, only then can one be free to work.
There is nothing worse than a fine artist who has something to do, a “job” or Commission,” thinks he has a “job” to do. Sculpture is always a “questionable” fine art, this is why
After the mail has been read and answered, bills paid, the place, studio cleaned and swept, children packed off to school or camp, wives released for shopping, after one has eaten, gone to the john, has taken the morning, noon or afternoon nap, free from any anxiety, all pains, pleasures, all distractions, obstacles, hindrances
Expressionism and surrealism is always fake, art as something else is always fake
Pension, income, when finally one has absolutely no reason not to work, it is exact
ideal time to begin
finished
One lives after one is through painting what one is painting
After one
One lives after there is no more painting to be done
One has been painting out
After the paintings have been painted out.