Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Craig Kalpakjian
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Good Weather (Exhibition: Pressure)
72%
L7 #10. 2020. Inkjet print in custom frame
If there's something to fault this piece for it's its reliance on, I guess, textuality to justify its physiognomic fucking around. Namely, it is so clearly an Albers citation that any sensuous experience you have with it ultimately circles back to the conceptualist referencing of that old colorist; this is different from how quotation works in a "modernist" sense (wherein the point is to transform and transcend, not to mull over, the reference), and it's also different from how ideas work as formal elements in a conceptualist sense (in good conceptual art, an idea or a notion will interact ambiguously and openly with the elements of the work that are physically there, rather than determinatively as the Albers thing does here). All that said, this piece is a fucking optical achievement, even if I would have rather seen it achieved without the historicism (or with a less reductive version of it). Obviously there's the way the irregular bespoke frame, curved in weird ways, conflicts with the plumbness of the geometric abstraction it contains; it's a fairly simple joke on high modernist art/design, but it's well told. But beyond that, there are subtler bits of craft that make this thing a pleasure to look at: the inkjet print is floated just so in the frame; the central blue square has this perfect penumbra that makes it tough to tell whether it's the top of a pyramid or the bottom of a well; the placement of that square down low in the print makes the whole thing's proportions feel anxious and weird in further harmony with the wonky frame. (2025)