(link)
The preponderance of overly tasteful paintings today is, in one sense, critically justified through its “reexamination” of modernism, particularly looking towards the forgotten’s more decorative tendencies, Delauney, Munch, Jawlensky, Hantai. And, coming out the mid-late 2000’s “indexicality” boom, in which every brushstroke was quotation and the artist’s hands removed for the theft - lost in the revolution of printmaking as painting - painting today still carries viewers' heads echoing this skepticism, and thus benefits: what was once derivative and gentle is now critical. It helps if you can carry this baggage out of your school.
The most interesting thing about Prekop’s paintings is the desire for the return of his hands, while looking not. The paintings do offer a little more in person, a use of transparency of linen, puzzles of layers, etc. In reproduction the visual unfolding of it’s making - the steps of what might-be but don’t-look-like a screenprint - are lost, the cleverness gone and the predominance of its nice-design packages is all one is left with, just how unbelievably tasteful these paintings today are.
