COMPUTER WORLD
Walking into the small skylit gallery at the Gagosian uptown where Urs Fischer’s new serial painting Sōtatsu is hung, I could only think, A computer has been here. The work consists of nine door-sized aluminum panels that have been printed digitally and rendered manually with epoxy paint. The initial panel shows a warm interior scene, with a sofa, bookshelf and a black cat, that’s gradually abstracted in the panels that follow and then, in the final panel, interpreted as a pretty cloudscape with two small black birds.
The panels have a remarkable soft, super-flat, burnished finish, like that on a gentleman’s metal watchband; they feel expensive.
They make magnificent decorator art, and would look fantastic on the living room walls of a bare white postmodern beach house in Malibu or Southampton, where there is a very real possibility they will end up.
But these aren’t paintings. The structure of each image is digital, fundamentally two-dimensional, and that shows right through the skillful color renderings. These pictures offer no depth, imaginative or dimensional. They aren’t windows into new worlds; they’re fields of color on a printout.