Paul Sietsema

Consider Vertical Coin Game (2021) and Vertical Newspaper (Modern British & Irish Art) (2021), for example, where dollar coins were used to move paint on a surface. “The geometric bodies of the coins moving against the rectangular edge of the canvas create a simple game of composition. The questionable painterly acts of composing and resting on the material qualities of paint to instill meaning are insinuated,” Sietsema notes of the former. In the latter, coins and paint are mixed and the combination is thrown like dice. The resulting shape obscures the image of a sculpture—a figure at rest by Henry Moore—reproduced in a newspaper ad for an auction house. 

‘The figure at rest’ is a motif that can also be seen in two of Sietsema’s paintings, each modeled on a work by Pablo Picasso. In these paintings, ‘the figure at rest’ is discordant with the complex process behind the work. “I’m interested in the way image production has become an almost effortless task with digital media and platforms; a kind of leisure activity,” Sietsema said. “My work involves much labor and handwork but has many of its origins in digital processes and related ideas.”

Exhibition posters created to mark the occasion of a gift of Picasso’s works to France in the 1990’s served as inspiration for several of Sietsema’s works in the exhibition. While Last Painting (2021) is a more precise replica of one of these fictionalized posters, which displays what was presumably the last landscape painted by Picasso, Sietsema transforms The Embrace (2022) and Black Picasso (2022) into a variant of the monochrome using a digital masking technique.

Black Phone Painting (2022), in enamel on linen, belongs to a series of paintings where Sietsema depicts rotary dial telephones: “The phone paintings are painted from images of phones with paint poured on them. So paint is the thing being depicted-and the image is inscribed with the same paint that is being depicted.” For Sietsema these phones reflect the ambiguity of communication itself. “These images I paint can be seen as communicating or not-they are open lines of communication, a connection between myself and someone experiencing the painting or perhaps they are off the hook-mute-a truncated line of communication that leaves them staring at an inert object.”

On view in the lower gallery will be two of Sietsema’s analog films: At the hour of tea (2013) and Abstract Composition (2014). As with many of his films, the works investigate the relationship between object and text. The 16mm color film, At the hour of tea, is composed of five distinct sequences featuring various anachronistic objects, often related to work, resting on desktops: silver coins, Roman glassware, a leatherette inbox and camera, an envelope, and a typewriter. Interspersed throughout the contemplative film is a typewritten text that describes a historical painting in modernist terms, supplanting first-hand experience with an authorial description. In the film, Abstract Composition, a colorless sign rotating in space systematically displays descriptions of objects for sale culled by the artist from auction sites and catalogs.