John Hurrell – 1 February, 2025

In this unusual presentation from German artist Ingo Meller, we see paint presented as manually-dragged marks from pigment-loaded house-painting brushes—with the vertical tails (and parallel bristle striations) present as their initial graphic impact on the supporting canvas tooth diminishes.

There are only a few of these hovering blurred smears each time. There is no hint of patterning or decoration. Some are lopsided with ‘balanced’ good taste being avoided. In this way, horizontal wormlike lines of squashed extruded oil-paint are converted into descending fading blurs, a philosophical comment perhaps on the fundamental act of paint application and the cultural impact of art.

Through these rudimentary manual acts, the gradual depletion of the brushed-on coloured pigment becomes a metaphor (perhaps unintended) for the impact of time on key events recorded in the annals of art history, their early significance gradually being downplayed as the contextualisation inevitably changes and meaning gets transmuted.

Most of these wiped works are presented with the loose canvas pinned up in large wooden trays placed on chocks and leant against the gallery walls. Details of the applied paint, colour type and brand, are handwritten on paper strips that are glued on the two narrow sides of each large tray. The specifics of materiality and contributing companies are emphasised.

These are not like say Millar, Frize, de Kooning or Reed in their gestural alliance, but more a chopped up, spread apart type of very minimalist non-textual Twombly in nature. The emphasis is on small scattered islands of paint application (these inventive squirts are very beautiful), and the lines from bristle edges from when pressure is applied, dragged and then removed. The ‘painting content’ is isolated squashed or projecting extrusions, and arm action signified by the descending tails of faint dragged marks left by wide brushes, that soon peter out.

Some earlier Meller projects (around 2003) emphasise a sweeping sensibility where the dragged mark tails are horizontal and traverse the width of the canvas, emphasising arm movement. These current works instead are vertically aligned and have a clipped, staggered and sometimes stuttering ambience.

Meller’s whopper leaning trays themselves are also interesting for what they represent, a flat container designed for offering some sort of gifted sustenance, that here (although austere) is profoundly mental, not nutritiously alimental. On the canvas we see ‘samples’ of oozed-out paint, some flattened marks, plus extrusions that show ‘prebrush’ manual processes linked to the tube and which project out from the woven support.

These ‘platters’ (with their scrawled explanations) indicate worlds of potential creative possibilities and different scales of oily pigment manipulation, as well as the pleasures of the loosest placement and its attendent organisational structure.

John Hurrell

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