Minimal Reloaded, Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle, Freiburg 2012

Tobias Abel, Carl Andre, Alan Charlton, Henrik Eiben, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, David Semper

Tobias Abel employs a variety of supports for his monochromatic paintings. Canvas can be seen as a conventional choice. Others – copper, aluminum – are not, though they can be found in Minimalism as well in the works of Carl Andre and Donald Judd. Abel’s focus is on their material characteristics.

His process – more empirical than intuitive – puts just as much emphasis on the color, weigh, and composition of the surface material as on the selected color of the acrylic paint. Painting and origin are part of a systematic exploration that puts the material and the thingness of the painting in the foreground. This begins with the selection of formats – which can be oriented entirely to industrial standards – and continues with the slightly rounded corners that result for example from the softness of the copper and the visible traces of the color application, a technique that very much resembles the work of the Radical Painting group.

The object-like character of his work is also reflected in their geometric yet unusual form: octagons and ellipses that use a single color to describe their own space. Painting here is an object. It does not create the illusion of a two-dimensional surface in front of the wall; it makes the wall itself into the background. The works, therefore, are not only preoccupied with themselves; they make direct reference to the things around them.

This systematic, logical foundation also determines the origination of Abel’s 12-part series of drawings. 12 vertical lines are drawn on gray paper from left to right with silver oil crayon. While the number results from the width of the paper, the distances are predetermined by the width of the ruler used. The series was completed in a day. Much like the conceptual work of Sol LeWitt, their first step involved the positing of an idea, a rule, a system from which a serial program grows and in which the investigation of form, color, and surface continues. As in Abel’s paintings, here too the status of the picture as material object becomes evident, a status that eliminates the internal difference between medium and material.

Text: Julia Galandi-Pascual