Paintings of colour
Daniel Pasteiner
20th March - 19th April 2008
Rod Barton Invites, EC2

There is a factory somewhere, I suspect in china or some other far eastern superpower, where they make waterfalls. In that factory there is someone who paints them - probably thousands per day. Three quick dabs of white paint and then some delicately wavering lines, suggestive of a Peter Lanyon, perhaps; a high modernist interpretation of landscape. When the paint is dry, the lid bearing the Technicolor photographic image of the waterfall on it is screwed down on top of the light box mechanism. The painting was simply to prevent light leaking into parts of the image where it would destroy the illusion of perpetually and naturally flowing water. You can see, probably have seen, the result in numerous take-a-ways and kebab houses. An oasis of arcadia in the strip-lit and arid city.

"You see a dot on the horizon...and it could be superman...but then it just turns out to be a plane or something."*

As long as it remains that dot, the possibility for the fantastic remains. Daniel Pasteiner is trying to remain in this space, as perhaps we all are. His minimal interventions on materials such as ready made canvasses, or the waterfall machine are framing devices, a few lines or blobs of paint demarcate the space of art - a form of territorial pissing- where we might look for transcendence, even perhaps find it, in the nothing that is outlined.

In the case of the ready made stretchers, they are shop-new, not even properly unwrapped; their tight cellophane skin still contains, hermetically sealed, the breath of the factory where they were produced. This thin space - the space that promises the purchaser a future of artistic endeavour- is the support that Pasteiner chooses to work on. He wisely decides not to risk the full disenchantment of unwrapping them and hearing the soft sigh of all that futurity collapsing back into our contingent present. Preferring to remain suspended in the split second before this, he refuses to start at zero, stating "my identity as an artist is a found object"*, recognising that now, there is no zero to start from. The mystical heroics of earlier abstraction, Barnett Newman, Pollock, Rothko; has been lost in a slew of off-the-peg identities and pound shop kitsch. The Cold War that framed and gave impetus to that moment is over; we won, apparently. That is where we have to start, and stay; in the push-pull between the blank promise of the commodity and the dot on the horizon that we daren't let get too close or clear.

Art and the Anti-World’ essay by Robin Bales.
*Quotes are from Daniel Pasteiner in conversation with the writer, January 2008