SCOTT EINSIG

INTRODUCTION | INVENTORY

PROFILE

ESSAY: Scott Einsig’s Noun Paintings
by Ric Kasini Kadoiur

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.**

Consider for a moment: The paintings in this exhibition are not Scott Einsig’s art, but the artifact or byproduct of his art.

Scott works with cheap materials: rejected paint from the hardware store, old silkscreens, mis-cut fabric for canvas. And he works with words, nouns specifically, that other people give him. He takes these random things and through the act of painting, works them together to form smart compositions that show a brilliant use of color and design. He is influenced by the marks of Phillip Guston and the painting/graffiti style of Keith Haring.

His palette is influenced by the availability of paint, but his color choices reflect a personal, expressive aesthetic. “The mistints or the oops paints. They're a dollar a quart. They're usually colors that people returned and they're like, "This isn't the color I wanted for my chair. I get them for cheap. I like that they're cheap, but I also like that they're interesting colors. You take all these rejected colors and you put them together and it creates something new.”

Conceptually, Einsig owes a great deal to the theoretical work of American artist Jonathan Lasker who correctly observed that the Minimalists were making art without metaphor and that “the gap between the image which one is recreating and the image which one arrives at is an interesting study in perception and intuition.” Einsig’s paintings work because he creates a bridge between the idea being painted and the image being looked at. He does not paint objects, but the idea of what those objects are. We, as the viewer, recognize the symbols and assign them meaning. Making the connection between the original noun and Einsig’s painting and our recognition of the objects is the experience of these paintings. They trade on the primacy of language in thought.

The role of intuition in the creation of these works cannot be understated. Einsig describes the act of painting as a compulsion. “It's something that, at the end of the day, you just have to do. These are a very easy way for me to come up with random things have little or no meaning and then I work it out. It's a process.” He works on two or three paintings at a time, and often with other people milling about. The canvas becomes the arena—to borrow from Harold Rosenberg—and the painting becomes a performance. The painting is in the action. The product of that performance is what is on the wall.

SOURCE
**Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters”, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press, New York, 1959).