The nine works in Andrew Chapman’s The Oft and the Howl all seem to come from somewhere else. A surprising indifference to the demands of both the market and art history to develop a recognizable individual style, this puzzle of variety plays off against the modest scale of the work. It comes across almost like a model of the profusion and polysemy of painting, in the same moment emphasizing breadth and drawing the viewer close.

The pleasures and problems of painting are inevitably caught up with the medium’s histories, which seem always to haunt its present. Although a few of the works here vaguely evoke antecedents from the history of abstraction—machine age modernism (Dragon’s World Limited 1979), Ferus Gallery California cool (Bit Que)—such likenesses are fleeting—just as in Split Tint with Pink Noise the impression of figuration tantalizes and recedes. Chapman for the most part eschews any discernible form of painterly mark-making, pursuing instead a series of mesmerizing—if often unplaceable—surface effects. And although the surfaces invite and reward close scrutiny, Chapman covers his tracks, obscuring hints of process. Many don’t even read obviously as painting: the lone sculpture-like work, Wyatt, appears like a peculiar fake rock, while works such as Leadpri, MG.5, and Pet Sounds are suspended between painting and image.

These anonymizing tactics help reorient the logic of abstraction in the age of image excess. A grid jumps out from among Chapman’s disparate compositions because the grid as a form has a special place in twentieth-century art. If in 1979 Rosalind Krauss could claim that the grid had been “almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech,” the extensive literature that it generated (to which her essay is probably the best-known addition) now clings to this thoroughly historicized form.[1] It is covered in the very language it allegedly sought to wall off. Chapman’s grid, V_4.9, with a surface so pristine as to banish the very thought of a human hand, tilts instead toward the surrounding works and the perceptual relations that emerge between them. In this, he captures something essential about the very different mode of abstraction inherent to image circulation—the endless flow of disparate and decontextualized sights. And yet nothing could seem further in tempo and tone than these meticulous, obsessive, and enigmatic paintings.

[1] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer, 1979), 50.

Text by Eli Diner