Untitled 

Editor: This intriguing untitled piece by Stanley Pinker uses watercolours to create a scene that's almost dreamlike in its abstraction. The geometric shapes and figures feel almost playful, but what I find most compelling is the relationship between them, and the colours employed to execute this abstract landscape, but that's just my interpretation! What catches your eye? Curator: Immediately, I consider the materiality of watercolour itself. Pinker isn't just applying pigment; he’s engaging with the very process of how water interacts with paper, how it pools and bleeds. The apparent naivete of the work, that "naive art" tag, I see instead as a deliberate dismantling of artifice. He seems interested in exposing the means of production, rather than hiding them. Editor: I hadn't thought about it that way, about the materials themselves being so present! So the 'naive art' tag diminishes that aspect? Curator: Potentially, yes. That label often ignores the labour involved and the artist's deliberate choices in manipulating the material. What's the effect of contrasting this deliberate materiality of the watercolours with those rigid geometric forms, the blocks and angular figures? Editor: I guess, seeing the rough edges of the watercolours makes the geometry stand out more, making it feel less like a landscape and more like, well, a constructed… something. Maybe a constructed set of ideas, thoughts or plans? Curator: Precisely! The very act of "making" becomes the subject. Forget the finished product as this flawless object; instead, what's on display is the raw stuff, the gestures, and the process that produces our experiences. What did you expect from an "abstraction", anyway? Editor: It is interesting to think about it like that! Thanks to the labour put into it by the artist, that challenges the idea of "high art," because its materials seem so deliberately raw, which feels refreshing. Curator: Precisely; let’s see where a deeper materialist analysis of Pinker’s ouvre takes us in deconstructing hierarchies.