Art Review: Vincent Falsetta at The Reading Room

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January 5th, 2012 7:53am

Simultaneously intimate and cerebral, Vincent Falsetta’s index cards, mounted in a grid covering two walls of the boutique-sized Reading Room, are a kind of lab notes for the artist as methodical producer. Written with a quill pen in homespun block script, they depict notes and notations ranging from experiments with form and material, to sketches of full-scale works and obscure diagrams, to diaristic observations and mental notes from daily life. (Since real index cards are not of archival quality, these are in fact custom-made simulated index cards made from Strathmore paper.)The several hundred cards on view from 2004 to 2011 are lettered and numbered to correspond with specific panel and canvas paintings from that period. Thanks to this exhibition Falsetta’s paintings, which were simultaneously on view at Conduit and 500x last month, can be seen in a whole different light. Recording what Gerhard Richter called “the daily practice of painting,” the exhibition has elements of George Maciunas’s enlightenment through schematic organization, as much as of On Kawara’s one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determination.



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