Page 10 - Art First: Dan Sturgis: Strict and Lax

Look again at the easy, speedy graphics of Shine on meand you find that—dots

inclu ded—they are neither speedy, easy nor graphic. The white squares are not
uniformly so: some are painted in flake white, some in titanium. Like all of
Sturgis’s canvases, this one has been primed with a roller and then worked
over, slowly and methodically, with sable brushes. Ωere are five or six layers

of each colour—‘You can see that it’s hand- made’, the artist says, ‘even though
[the surface] is solid enough to hide any kind of gesture.’ A work such as Learning

to failis about the times it evokes, but it is also about the time it took to make.
And it is about both of those things equally and at once.

[6 ] Ωe art of the last 40 years, and painting in particular, has been vexed by the ques -
tion of irony. Ωe line between modernism and post mod ernism has seemed
absolute. You can be one thing or the other, but not both—modern or postmodern,

ironic or actual, paint erly or not. Sturgis is hav ing none of this. Ωere is no either/
or in his work: ‘I like the idea that things can speak in multiple voices’, he says.

Ωis is as true of the suite of four new works on paper in this show as of the can -

vases. Sturgis likes to refer to theseworks as drawings, although they are actually
paintings made in thin acrylic washes. Again, there is the florid motif—or perhaps
floral in this case, its ele ments here being petal-shaped—peopled with Sturgis-
dots, like tiny cartoon charac ters silhouetted on flat-pack cartoon hills.

Just as the stop-signs in Position and accordand Learning to failwere prone to move,
so the composition of Sturgis’s drawings feels unstable, the grey petal-menhirs