Stretcher (covered with a sheet of transparent plastic) 1967

Daniel Dezeuze made this "Stretcher (covered with a sheet of transparent plastic)", well, sometime. I find myself drawn to the raw materiality here. He's taken the literal support structure, the bones of painting, and presented it as the artwork itself. You can see the canvas stretcher, the wooden frame usually hidden behind the painted surface. It's so bare, so exposed. Think about the texture of the wood, that pale, sanded colour. It has a subtle, almost tactile quality. It makes you want to reach out and touch it. There's something about this piece that's very self-aware, like it's winking at the whole history of painting. It’s as if he's asking, "What really matters? Is it the image, or the thing itself?" It reminds me a little bit of some of Blinky Palermo's work, that simplicity, that reduction to basic elements.