John Andrews: First Contact

Iowa-based artist John Andrews makes pigmented beeswax paintings on aluminum, which explore repetition and the accumulation of a visual motif. Forms and techniques developed for technological or commercial purposes are deliberately employed in an expressive context. Andrews’ new paintings involve the use of the raster (ben-day dot) as an ordered repetition and as a referent to reproductive printing and mediated experience. The raster pattern hovers on the surface of the works, while underlying layers reveal opposing handmade pinpricks and subtle color variations.

The work invites simultaneous readings, as traditional monochrome painting and autonomous objects of aesthetic contemplation, and as a critique of the former, questioning the possibility of an immanent (i.e. direct, immediate, and totalizing) experience, and questioning the nature of originality, particularly as it relates to singularity.