Brian Smith
Painting by numbers based on part of the score “Drumming” by Steve Reich
2021
Archive inks on archive paper
Signed and titled
29,7 x 21 cm

The “Paintings By Number” (whether of images, words or musical notation, I do call them paintings) involve a loss – even an absence – of cultural identity. The picture, or the thing represented, “disappears”. If the image was merely outlined, it might look like some sort of drawing, and still be perfectly assimilable into this or that art category. But the fact that the outlined areas are numbered, and that we know these numbers refer to a particular colour, turns the work into something else. In most of my Painting By Number works there is placed upon them or carried within them a refusal. The areas are too small, the arrows pointing to them too large. A possibility or suggestion is offered, then withdrawn. However, sometimes a constraint is more interesting, richer, more vivid, than a permission.

€ 1400.-