31 August 2025
Great little essay on the use of language in contemporary painting by Jonathan (Tignor) from the latest entry to his Malerblöd Substack (worth a subscription if you're reading this). Especially the bit where he explains: “Language is hardly stable, but against the backdrop of an abstract painting, there is an illusion of stability.”
He addresses Daisy Parris's painting Portrait of a Poem, pointing out how “the third poetic panel is the most successful to [him] because it operates like the Basquiat above [Untitled (Tar Tar Tar, Lead Lead Lead), 1981]. “Haven’t / Wrote” is barely legible through the blast of paint. It is says more by saying less.”
That immediately made me think of Jasper Johns's Flag (1954-55), which I just saw for the first time at MoMA in New York. It's nearly impossible to find an image online that is high-quality enough to decipher the tiny sentences contained in the bits of its newspaper articles caked in encaustic, but up close in person there were many great little moments that I could imagine must have been quite satisfying for him to recontextualize. Remembering a small section in particular of one of the flag's stripes where most of the newsprint is covered, but the end of a sentence about someone “going into shock” is legible. That to me felt like a nice example of language being used to expand rather than prescribe.