Page 5 - Art First: Dan Sturgis: Strict and Lax

DANIEL STURGIS

HISTORY PAINTINGS

charles darwent

Look down the list of Daniel Sturgis’s solo exhibitions and a pattern begins
to emerge. Two patterns, in fact. To every title, there is an equal and opposite
title—Everybody Loves Somebodypaired o¹ with Abstract Logic, Tough Lovewith

Possibilities in Geometric Abstraction, Fill of Beautyand Equal Minds. Emotion and
intellect, heart and head, twine around each other like the strands of a double [1 ]
helix. So, too, with Sturgis’s art.

Take Shine on me, a new work in this exhibition. A quick glance will tell you
that it is two things, an abstract painting and a painting about abstract pain -
ting. If it looks like a Bridget Riley, then that is not by acci dent. One of the
demands Sturgis’s picture makes of the viewer is an answer to the question

of how it is likely to be seen historically—whether it is possible, in the 21st
century, to paint a canvas with bands of black-and-white checkerboard
squares with out somebody, some where saying, ‘It looks like a Bridget Riley’.
Beyond that again is the broader ques tion of whether there is anylode

of abstract painting that has not already been mined, and in what ways
that might matter.