John Hurrell – 20 December, 2018

The exciting species of painting presented here by Andre Hemer successfully blends-via digital technology—photography, meteorological light conditions, printing, scanning, painting and sculptural wall relief. It centres on paint as manipulated substance, its outdoors illumination documented during the day or evening, and the printing on canvas of those images: fragmented, isolated and then reassembled on a physically flat plane that has a little more manual application on the surface, with 3D components added. The latter seem to be sculpturally printed, being quite large so they project out from the wall.

There is more to this than technical wizardry. Hemer’s paintings are highly evocative, the dark (evening scanned) ones suggesting leaf litter, potpourri, or beds of collaged soiled rags, the pale (daytime scanned) works suggesting chocolate or lolly wrappers, some variety of indulgent oral consumerism — or curling bits of flayed skin. And overall, we are always aware of the faecal nature of extruded and squished-around paint when it is not flattened out.

Plus the scanning and digital printing processes are revelled in, thin parallel horizontal lines from the CMY spectral breakdown, occasionally apparent. These streaky pigment traces-rarely exposed, and if occurring then normally hidden—have been deliberately left.

A strange hybrid then, this variety of printed painting (compare with Judy Millar) and sprayed paint is also a sculpture and a photograph. Its surface is a key component, depicting applied paint that is mostly oddly devoid of tactility. The smooth flatness—with its consistently matte sheen—is crucial.

That picture plane—seen in such a painting/photograph amalgam—is affected by the outdoor light generated within the composite aggregate of paint daub images, light from several times; several days; illuminated surfaces of hardening plastic paint, their reflected chromas all recorded, each one distinct but now collectively made uniform in a softly undulating ‘collage.’

Like a conceptual flamethrower, Hemer‘s richly associative (and overtly decorative) works incinerate any notion of media purity, violently spurning intrinsic material properties, in a sense mocking art history with its lists of genius media specialists. Their rhetoric is mischievous and exciting, aggressively zeroing in on any limiting border in order to breach it.

John Hurrell

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