John Hurrell – 3 August, 2013

In this show Patrick Lundberg presents four new ‘pin’ works that are a focussed extension of one aspect of his last exhibition at Ivan Anthony, when he had several types of innovative painting. Four rooms here have a work each: a wall displaying a group of about a dozen mapping pins that have had their ball heads coated with gesso, acrylic and varnish, or been converted into angled cylinders of fired clay, and then painted.

Occasionally amongst these ‘ball’ works, a head turns into a small cone or has an unexpected dark patch underneath. Most have delicate little patterns of thin paint or improvised fine squiggles on their surfaces - sometimes pristine letters. Often they are subtly mottled or structured like teeny-weeny soccer balls. (The exhibition’s title is Games.)

These tiny globes are spread out in vague grid formations. Unlike say Richard Killeen with his cutouts, Lundberg has no strict instructions about how to display them in a gallery or at home. They don’t have to be in a group or on one wall, or even kept spatially apart. They could be touching and in a line or shape - or they could be spread out around the eight corners of a room.

So what’s the point of this apparent indifference to a consistent visual presentation? Does such openness mean the work really has a life of its own that the artist and dealer may later discover after each sale or loan, through which new unpredicted interpretative meanings can become manifest - even if the pins stay in a matchbox, that it is always an artwork as such, even if that box is kept for example in an unforeseen (possibly unknown to owner) location?

Thinking of less extreme scenarios, do we, for example, ponder each element on the wall in isolation, a quarantined little world, or is it (as presented in this show) a fragment that is part of a larger interconnected community of pins where analysing the types of different ‘relational’ proximities between them is crucial?

You might think I’m getting a bit carried away here with these issues, but amusingly in this exhibition, even the works’ titles show an aversion to fixity. It is as if permanently naming an artwork is too repugnant a commitment for the artist to consider, something that unnecessarily curtails the range of interpretative viewing possibilities. Maybe that refusal for nominal containment is the real content of this work - the conceptual core so to speak - a vacillating inclination that favours putting (almost) unlabelled and (almost) installationally unrestricted artworks in the hands of others just to see what eventuates, letting them find their own unanticipated meaning and visual structure, their own freshly discovered semantic and ocular coherence.

John Hurrell

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