Oscar Perry: Spoorloos

Zone, Dreadnaught, Pontoon. The early twentieth century haunts Oscar Perry’s new body of work, ‘Spoorloos’, a collection of small-scale sculptural paintings. The works conjure landscapes pockmarked by the ravages of war, a generation shell-shocked and broken, flags shredded and bloodied. The twilight of the European nation state as its global power fractured. As for politics, so too for painting. Abstract space, geometric forms, non-objective composition. The formal contours that furnished modernism’s artistic hegemony. But again, only as something pallid, insufficient, and fading. The excessive spatter of Sanitorium rupturing the frame, the viscous flatlining of EKG putting paid to any purity of line, and the recurrent sponge-induced depths resisting the flatness of abstraction. The title of the show refers to a 1998 Dutch film translated into English as The Vanishing, which begs the question, what has vanished? This, it seems to me, is that which Lenin once identified as the second stage of capitalism, the stage of monopoly and imperialism, and along with it, let me add, the modernism that was its artistic form.

—Matthew Taft