NYAB Event - Kadar Brock "Unclaimed Space"

Kadar Brock "Unclaimed Space"

Thierry Goldberg

This event has ended.

The paintings on view are the result of old work that the artist has transformed through a process of erasure. In this sense, the new work consists of residues, traces, specters—end products, evidence of what's left over, after the original images have been almost completely destroyed. In this way, Brock pushes the image to its threshold, stripping away and discarding what the canvas, and by extension, the artist himself, once held fast to, in order to see what remains.

As well as whitewashing the canvas, Brock has scraped and rubbed the canvas down to a plaster-like smoothness, fissured here and there with hairline cracks and ripples. What remains is a kind of radiant detritus, a painting that is a ghost-image, filled with the traces of the almost-entirely eradicated original. Lines and layers of grey appear on the surface like creased sheets of sheer drapery, or overlapping tracing paper with a near-transparent quality. Some of the brushstrokes of the old images, especially where the paint had been applied thickly, make patterns across the canvas, suggesting the painting's history, but one that is hard to decipher. Viewers are limited in their ability to imagine what the painting might once have looked like. And yet it goes without saying that these new paintings are not significant merely as artifacts, or as nostalgic emblems of an irretrievable past that has been destroyed and rejected. Certainly, these erasures, or "revised" works, if we may call them that, stand alone. Their ghostly appearance, bordering somewhere between alien decrepitude and an aura-filled sublime, give them a dynamic and dramatically provocative quality.