Diao’s work is often premised in the metanarrative established over the paintings, the provenance of painting, his own career, his fictional career hopes etc. Here the press release is in Spanish and the painting’s text in Cyrillic alphabet. We’re left with a formal mystery, of architectural bits printed and isolated, repeated, and painted as geometric abstraction, layered, and compared with futurist exhibitions, and then plus the Cyrillic.
The work extends a net of hope-to-be explication around itself, building and deferring and gesturing at itself, a slow-build complexing that structure a space of confusion and doubling back and second guessing. Somehow R.H. Quaytman meets Daan van Golden, weirdly.