Michael Voss

For exhibition 43 we are pleased to be showing the paintings of Michael Voss, small-scale oils on linen. Voss was born in Brazil of German parentage and now lives and works in New York. Voss charts the deep geology of painting, working a kind of plate tectonics with pigment, setting up drifting continental shelves that collide, kick up along their fault zones, and form topologies in the process. He maps the congealed masses, showing the way around the horn and how far inland this tributary will take you. He shows who passed this way through the brush, and whether they were in a hurry or not. It is as if we were getting our news from tree bark. These paintings could be thought of as fields lying somewhere off the grid and beyond the dependency of distributed networks, and at the same time as field recordings, their roughly hewn aspect serving as high fidelity. In the contemporary context they may seem low tech, except that painting, rather than being an old technology, is more like the perennial base condition technology addresses. The weight of the mission Voss has undertaken can be measured against the value we place on our own sensate experience of the world, and by how much we still navigate with a visual acuity indelibly linked to our sense of touch.