Meyer Vaisman: In The Vicinity of History, 5774

The show features new large-scale works with new materials and techniques. Meyer Vaisman (b. 1960, Caracas) has been living and working in Barcelona for the last 14 years.

Vaisman presents a new body of works that reflects on his own practice of the past 28 years, while forging a new and concentrated exploration on ideas of self-representation through a coded abstrac- tion.

Since the mid-1980s, Vaisman has sought to create paintings without his hand or touch, and his earliest works employed mechanical techniques and commercial processed inks. He continues his interest in photomechanical reproduction and its transformation into digital printing, employing the most current available technologies and creating inkjet paintings on industrial plywood.

Where the artist previously zoomed in on the canvas weave of a picture’s surface, these new works draw our atten- tion to the back, wooden stretcher bars of a painting: everything is inside out, back to front, upside down, and mirror-imaged. The primary motif in this exhibition is Vaisman‘s own signature. While a sig- nature is the smallest gestural mark one makes on a daily basis, it is rendered useless and impersonal by repetition.

The artist’s early works articulated the displacement of actual painting by simulated and reproduced imagery; his new paintings investigate the idea of self as subject through the deployment, repetition, and layering of his own autographic mark or thumb print.