Page 11 - Art First: Dan Sturgis: Strict and Lax

in their foreground about to topple over. Ωe organ isa tion of colour seems

simple—grey in front of green, green in front of ox blood, oxblood over yellow
and white—although the per spec tive it implies feels tenuous: two grey petals
overlap each other in one corner, one green petal seems to sit on the same
frontal plane as the grey. As with the canvases, there is a sense that some thing

may be about to kick o¹; an animation or character ful ness that seems light-
hearted and yet faintly anxious.

Ωis duality is very much what the works are about. As with the larger paint -

ings, the drawings resolutely refuse to take them selves seriously, but in a res -
olutely serious way. Looked at quickly, they might be taken for prints; and that [7 ]
mistake in identity is intentional. Ωings that are slow, painstaking and paint -
erly set out to appear quick and mechan ically made. Ωey also appear to be

ident ical, when they are not. Each is minutely di¹erent from the other, one
having a nick of oxblood pig ment missing from its top left edge, another an
extra column of lemon-and-white squares on the right. Ωey are, Sturgis says,
‘not equal but equivalent’.

Why make things that are so di¾cult look so easy? You might think of a Je¹
Koons balloon-dog, a piece of fairground trash to which insanely high produc -
tion values and costs have been applied. Koons’s aim was to ironise, though,

and Sturgis is emphat ically not an ironist. Ωat is not to say that he doesn’t see
irony, but that his work takes it as a subject rather than as a pro cess. Working
in multi ples is part of this double strategy. ‘Series were the stock of much