The Long Goodbye

Dan Pasteiner  and  Jon Kipps

11 – 26 September 2020

If life is lived mostly unconsciously then whoever owns the circuits and platforms that we operate within will determine the parameters of the kind of actions we undertake. With the post-virus dominance of the digital as social media platforms are increasingly seen as equivalent to real lived experience, the physical art object reaffirms its analogue presence. As a much older technology, we can see through the constructs of its illusions, which continue to compel us as it articulates the space that we know with our bodies.

Similarly, the physical journey to bring the work to Belgrade is important with the process of navigating the road networks as boarders close due to Covid flare-ups. The 2000 km drive from the UK on the eastern edge of Europe across to Serbia on the western side, connects these two countries that boarder and will soon both be outside of the EU (following Brexit).

Jon Kipps’s immutable sculptures use a language born out of the fusion of the utilitarian aesthetics of security barriers with the minimalist stream of modernism. Enclosure-forming components are carefully crafted and rendered alien from the environment by surfaces treated with wood dyes.

Dan Pasteiner’s Calendar paintings are based on lunar calendars overlaid on landscapes. The ‘days’ are marked by crescent shapes made with acrylic paint pushed through road stencils. Oil paint is then pressed from underneath forming the ‘ground’. The mesh of the canvas literally ‘mediates’ the paint, creating a kind of denatured space-time diagram.

Our perception of time is being warped by the algorithms of capital. The climate collapse accelerates, neighboring seasons interpenetrate one another and incoming weeks contain both summer and autumn. National boarders solidify.

In Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye, a private detective appears to be out of time, bemused by the age he lives in. He repeatedly says ‘that’s okay by me’ until it is not.

Photo: N. Ivanović