Laid on to good effect

Its been a while since Alex Spremberg showed his work in Perth. Spremberg is a process artist, a term that refers to all artists whose work relies on the way in which their art is made for its effect.

As such, it tells you very little about what a particular painting might look like. It might be a
complex geometric pattern in which one layer of translucent paint runs over another in an ecstatic illusory weave like some of Spremberg's earlier work.

Alternatively, the logic of the painting process might have more to do with the material qualities of the paint—thick or runny, translucent or opaque — and the order and timing of the way the different layers were applied. This is the approach Spremberg has taken in The Colour of Paint, his excellent new exhibition at Galerie Düsseldorf.

A painting made this way need not look like a diagram. The image it produces is a direct result of the material properties of the medium and the procedures of the artist. This is the closest that art can get to being a natural, first-order event like a sunset or a breaking wave.

For centuries, artists have longed for their work to become real but for most of them, this resulted in futile attempts to imitate the mere look of things, which always looked artificial. That seriously realistic artworks always turn out to be non- representational, even abstract, is the most delightful irony of contemporary art.

This may sound a little too serious — in fact, Spremberg's use of materials is witty, elegant and
delicious to contemplate. He is a past master at drawing the viewer into a fantastic game of retracing the actions and events which led to the painting.

For instance, the two big enamel-on-wood paintings, Black on White and White on Black, are
clearly made by running one liquid colour into a field of the other. This causes the compressed curves made by the dribbling gesture to bleed outwards to the point where the weight of black and white liquids is equally balanced and form of natural order is produced. Almost everyone has seen similar events — in a bowl of strawberries and cream, for instance, which may account for the overwhelmingly sensual quality of these two paintings.

Spremberg has been inspired by some unexpected sources The American painter Jasper Johns is often thought of as a pop artist but he was profoundly concerned with the processes of painting. To bring these to the foreground in his work, he often used easily recognisable images — thus he made a map of the United States — in strong expressionist colours and brush strokes and bright colour~ He also superimposed sequences of one over another with the same bright, brash gestures.

The title and some of the forms of Spremberg's The Rising of the Numbers is reminiscent of
John's strategy, as is Spremberg's frequent use of layers of gesture~ or events Spremberg, however, freezes them in layers of varnish and enamel to produce a glittering, translucent depth that can seem to slip back to infinity.

One series of smaller Submersion Paintings concentrates on the primary sensation of being
engulfed in a timeless, eddying euphoria. Spremberg allows swirling black and golden-yellow
enamel to be overwhelmed by the smooth, shiny surface of a pool of varnish. Again one is struck by some unexpected precedents. At one stage, the drip painter Jackson Pollock became obsessed with the issue of depth. In works like The Deep, he gave this simple phenomenon enormous metaphysical significance.

Spremberg, too, has moments of profundity, though he is never so pretentious about it as
Pollock. His Puddles No. 1-3, for instance, are nothing but pools of the deep, dark infinity that can be glimpsed beneath one's feet on a rainy day. On the other hand, he occasionally risks the kind of light-hearted, arbitrary effect that can instantly denote a work of art, returning it — a mere object — to our day-to-day world of failed artifice.

When he uses a wide range of colours in the Colourstream Series, the arbitrary nature of his gestures shows in their placement within each layer and he occasional respond~ with a false move. There's a very fine line between ecstatically animate material and the bogus
revelation~ of the lava lamp. Nearly always, Spremberg takes the risk and comes out ahead. This show is not to be missed.

Dr David Bromfield
The West Australian
Big Weekend
Saturday 9 December 2000
Arts Edited by Ron Banks