ABSTRACTION AS SELF-SUSTAINABLE ARGUMENT

What is striking in this summoning up of so many different and sometimes mutually exclusive approaches to recent abstract painting is the pace of the successive transitions between various positions, moving from one side of the argument to another. In its articulation and methodology, this fast-moving momentum is not without evoking Frank Stella’s restless progression between 1958 and 1974, from his black paintings to his first metal pieces. But where Stella can be seen as moving fast to fine-tune a specific agenda about pictorial space (which ultimately led to a spectacular dead-end), far from the predetermined Modernist hierarchy that Stella was holding to, Quetsch, instead of digging into a single specific conceptual model, seems to be sifting through different ones, shifting between multiple and various viewpoints and paradigms of the recent narratives on Abstraction, and considering them all as compatible parts of a fast-moving self-sustained argument of Abstraction with its history.

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In hindsight, his previous 2022 show at Ceysson-Bénétière in Paris can be seen today as a transition. It combined works still rooted in the prior series of modular stretchers coated with resin, seemingly in different stages of self-destruction, with newer works painted on un-stretched canvas, this time mounted on wall shelves or hanging on clotheslines, expanding the investigation of presentation strategies further. The variety of work modes on view may have even prompted viewers to wonder if this was a group show rather than a one-person show. 

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But what seemed to be at stake there, instead of a critique of the signature style or the postmodern trope of ironic citations as multiple artistic personality disorder, was an approach to Abstraction from different angles meant to gauge and weigh the conditions, possibilities, and limits, of a sustained practice of Abstract painting today. Instead of the Modernist unilateral and utopian statement and its postmodern deconstruction, we were looking at the exercise of painting as a possible sustainable argument between seemingly opposite paradigms, an attitude best exemplified by someone like Blinky Palermo back in the seventies.

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The term “argument” might be preferable to “dialogue” because it doesn’t imply a typical binary opposition, such as Modernism versus Postmodernism. Instead, it includes multiple perspectives, each vying for relevance. In Palermo’s case, this refers to his simultaneous investigations into different avenues and modes of production, perception, and reception for abstract painting.

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Fast forward to the present show and the argument’s latest stage (to date). Moving away from his recent entropic, Apollonian vision of painting, Quetsch seems headed toward a new place of sublimation, revisiting what I would call the Supports/Surfaces effect (as others have been referring to the reception of the Duchamp effect arriving as a telegram forty years later, for its part Supports/Surfaces’ telegram only took thirty years to reach these shores), possibly attracted to its unlikely combination of a hard line theoretical backbone with a soft spot for painterly hedonism, as a Dionysian antidote to the previous work, a change made more necessary by today’s darkening global political horizon. 

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A few of the pieces in the show seem to expand on that Supports/Surfaces aesthetics, with references to Noel Dolla’s early drying-rack pieces being perhaps the most obvious in the central installation of the front gallery. In contrast, other works showed reminiscences of Claude Viallat and Louis Cane’s sense of color. But not to be restricted just to European sources, Quetsch here is also referencing the type of American deconstructed problematics of the seventies represented by Alan Shields and Al Loving, as well as, more recently, Joe Fyfe’s esthetics of semiotic entropy as a type of third world and second-hand flea-market cannibalizing of Western ideas (such as Modernism or Postmodernism), repurposed in a post-colonial context.

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Perhaps the fact of living and working in Luxembourg, at the confluence of three significant narratives of European painting, such as the Calvinist Dutch one, both formally purist and expressionist, the German one, of romantic expressionism, and the French one, more on the Latin Catholic end of the spectrum, of Epicurean rationalism, and being geographically distanced from the international art centers, allows one to move more freely between them without carrying the burden of a specific cultural allegiance, and taking them instead with equal relevance as different facets of the same historical moment. 

It is encouraging for someone of my generation to see someone of Quetsch’s generation adopting the debates around Abstraction to such an extent. At the same time, the market and the institution have mostly ignored its recent developments. In our days of global revisionism and intellectual regression, which exacerbate a generational divide based not just on a position of rejection of Abstraction but on a state of almost complete amnesia, it is a rare feat to see a younger painter embrace the recent history of abstract painting so fully, contradictions, warts, and all.

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Perhaps we should understand the “Home” mentioned in the exhibition’s title as the improbable resolution site to which this endless quest and self-argumentation might ultimately lead us.