JOHN HENDERSON

The two sculptures on view are easily mistaken for large shimmeringpaintings. In fact, these works are copper replicas of paintings, cast withprecision using a process known as electrotyping. The fine details ofHenderson’s original, thickly-textured paintings are captured exactinglyinto the surface of rubber molds. Submerged in a chemical bath, theelectrotyping process slowly deposits copper ions into Henderson’smolds by way of an electrical current. The artist chooses to destroy theoriginal paintings such that the final copper sculptures serve as a kind ofdocumentation of artworks that no longer exist. Adding to the complexity,each work in this series is marked by a unique patina that is the result ofchance effect: a silver mixture that is used to render the rubber moldselectrically conductive unpredictably transfers into the copper surfaces.Henderson embraces these irregular compositions as a kind of automatic painting. According to the artist: “There is a poetic contrast betweenthe control necessary to capture the surface of an object with such verisimilitude and the decision to allow the copy ‘repaint’ itself.”

In conversation with the two sculptures’ emphasis on the topographicalaspects of gestural mark-making, Henderson’s three actual paintings oncanvas are instead utterly flat and absent of textural variation. These paintings begin with an accumulation of countless layers of paint, each new layer covering and obscuring the previous one. Ultimately, Hendersonfinely sands away the surface, creating a palimpsestic network of colorsthat allows for later layers of paint to merge into earlier ones. The surfaces of these paintings are confusingly uniform-yet-complex chromaticfields that feel almost digital in their lack of planar depth. The paintings’images portray a record of accumulation but the absence of a corres-ponding physical index is perplexing. To complete the works, the artistframes each canvas in a crisp bezel of thin oil paint, a kind of punctuation that simultaneously exaggerates the separation of surface from support while furthering an illusion of depth.

Lastly, the one photograph in the exhibition further extends the compounding logic of making and unmaking introduced by the sculptures andpaintings. For this work, Henderson paints on top of a snapshot photo-graph before scanning and reprinting the image at a larger scale. Withsimilar logic to the copper sculptures, here the original painted-over-photograph is discarded and the documentation becomes the final artwork.The resultant image—with an ambiguous shadow that provides an illusion of three-dimensionality—invites the viewer question the conceptualand physical space between production and display. What does it meanto create separations between the performance of painting, the object ofpainting, and the image of painting?