Introduction

John Bock, Peter Doig, and Fred Tomaselli seem to be spelling out a new universe in the act of shaping their personal inventory in space or confining it to a plane. The first paints, the second constructs and gives eccentric lectures, and the third embeds tiny cutouts and real plants under an acrylic veneer. Their points of reference burrow deep into the world and break out of it, oscillating between cosmic and atomistic dimensions. It is as if the universe and its subuniverses were being tidied in order to create startling new complexities, the likes of which, though often conjectured, have never been seen in this form before, for they are certainly not hermetically sealed. On the contrary, they breathe a supra-personal and comprehensible credibility. Are these artists forging, pasting, and even knitting a new concept of authenticity with their matter-of-fact array of curious set pieces?

The heart of the matter is a world perceived in close and, so to speak, truthful association with the activities attendant upon that perception. If an artistic past reverberates in the “intimacy” of Peter Doig’s paintings, then it is precisely because the quintessential ordinariness of the subject matter that feeds into them speaks so intensely of today. This explains the engaging approach to materials that strikes the viewer on closer, empathetic study. Scents, colors, images are inscribed in the “oil on canvas” as wide-ranging immaterial elements, as the sedimentation of scraps deposited, invited and uninvited, in all of us, for are we not at times remote-controlled machines of sensation?

John Bock also proposes an astonishing treatment of materials by shifting ideas of truth content to the abstruse backyards of experience and discourse: to the realms of shaving cream, bean soup, and bales of hay, as well as the remote and recondite scholarship of abstract scientific formulas and inaccessible laboratories. Solid, down-to-earth fact and aloof abstraction blend into each other in the most unlikely—or rather likely—encounters between reputed nature and crystalline theory, between heartless sanity and heartfelt insanity.

The curiosities dealt with in this issue of Parkett warrant that designation only from a specific vantage point. The picture on the cover shows searchers willingly immersed for the moment in another, “alien” world—one that quite clearly belongs to all that is old and familiar. Concepts not only of material but also of time melt into each other in the works of these artists.

Fred Tomaselli’s pictures, reminiscent of amber, capture both eons and seconds that coalesce into the most delicately chiseled images of unfathomable depth. When Tomaselli plunges into the proverbial flood of mass media images and, with devoted care, patiently shifts and organizes his clipped “atoms” until the universe radiates anew in the soaring dimensions of his spaces, it seems he has found a passing answer to the question of why such a flood of images even exists.

The Insert is by Marcel Dzama, and the spine has been designed by Fiona Banner.