Israel Lund
Israel Lund’s paintings are a record of the static within a system of reproduction. There is a point at which they commenced, but they began with an image of nothing, as Lund initially burns an open rectangle into a silkscreen, unevenly forcing black ink through the blank image onto a canvas. By affecting a copy of nothing, Lund imports no other information to the painting’s surface but that which is already inherent to the process of reproduction itself (e.g. the black ink, its semi-mechanical application, the data assumed to be copied), thereby allowing the system to generate the image. As he distorts, enlarges, degrades, and re-inserts these copies further, Lund extrapolates a recursive and deconstructive method of reproduction that continually re-doubles upon itself, imparting a physical and conceptual liquidity to each individual painting, alleviating the burden of originality from any work and the artist himself.
The works he showed at his 2013 exhibition at Eleven Rivington in New York had long since distanced themselves, having appeared in an artist book, then haphazardly rearticulated through three-color process paintings (cyan, yellow, and magenta), scanned, and digitally distributed on his and others tumblr pages, and presently re-photographed through a PDF generating application on …
Israel Lund’s paintings are a record of the static within a system of reproduction. There is a point at which they commenced, but they began with an image of nothing, as Lund initially burns an open rectangle into a silkscreen, unevenly forcing black ink through the blank image onto a canvas. By affecting a copy of nothing, Lund imports no other information to the painting’s surface but that which is already inherent to the process of reproduction itself (e.g. the black ink, its semi-mechanical application, the data assumed to be copied), thereby allowing the system to generate the image. As he distorts, enlarges, degrades, and re-inserts these copies further, Lund extrapolates a recursive and deconstructive method of reproduction that continually re-doubles upon itself, imparting a physical and conceptual liquidity to each individual painting, alleviating the burden of originality from any work and the artist himself.
The works he showed at his 2013 exhibition at Eleven Rivington in New York had long since distanced themselves, having appeared in an artist book, then haphazardly rearticulated through three-color process paintings (cyan, yellow, and magenta), scanned, and digitally distributed on his and others tumblr pages, and presently re-photographed through a PDF generating application on his phone, the images from which provide the basis for this exhibition. The paintings are altered as much by their actual, physical production, as by their dissemination–each step in this process degrading the copies further, purposefully leaving us with no original by which we can ground the work. The paintings only change slightly from iteration to iteration, but they flood the system with copies of themselves, polluting the essential qualities of the work with its innumerable duplications and the mutations that accord such a process.
Lund has had solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles, Elaine Levy Project in Brussels, and Eleven Rivington in New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions across Europe and the US at venues including David Lewis Gallery in New York, Middlemarch in Brussels, Kresge Gallery at Ramapo College in Mahwah, and TORRI in Paris.
Courtesy of Eleven Rivington