Feature Inc :: David Deutsch: Neighbors and Strangers- 27 March

While these recent paintings by David Deutsch appear extremely different from those of the last 25 years, continuity can be seen in their combining of abstraction and representation, the perspective of surveillance or observation, and sense of the impending. With regard to his occasional but notable rotunda paintings, 16 or so painted between 1989 and 2003, the connection is most simply the figure within a container.

These recent paintings are transfers and as such are related to the painting process for David’s plywood paintings from the early 70s. They are painted in acrylic on plastic sheeting, allowed to dry, an appropriately sized canvas is primed with a medium, and the plastic sheeting is placed paint surface down onto the primed canvas, smoothed and let to set for a day or two and then peeled away. The painted image has been absorbed into the medium covered surface of the canvas and the pulled plastic is again clear. This reversal is a distancing process, a device similar to checking out the strength of a painting’s form by looking at it upside down or in a mirror, and as well allows a myriad of seams, creases, ridges, and distressed surfaces that occur during the printing process to undermine the expressionist brush work of the so called painting. These qualities lure us into inspecting the paint application and separate us from the subject matter. Yet once we enter the physical uncertainty of the materiality we find that this alternate universe is indeed embedded in the other.

David Deutsch