Jordan Kantor’s self-titled solo exhibition currently on view at Ratio 3 sounds an ambitious if somewhat problematic note. Unlike Kantor’s past exhibitions, which have consisted almost exclusively of paintings, this show combines a broad range of media. The exhibition includes about a dozen paintings, a series of sixteen near-identical etchings, two looping slide projections, one photographic X-ray print, a painting-cum-sculpture, and a mixed media tableau. The press release suggests that the included works, while individually priced, are “conceived as a constellation…to be seen together in the space in which they are shown.”^[1] This supposition generally holds true, and Kantor’s works, in combination, create a richer terrain than any individual piece possesses.   

The complex array of pieces conveys a studied engagement with painting’s elusive boundaries. They self-reflexively mine Kantor's previous pieces as well as the materials produced by his active painting practice. Their subtle interplay evidences an inquisitive intellect steeped in both current discourse and historical precedent. However, his works effectively undermine their own value by positioning themselves as no more important than the materials and processes used to produce them. The complex shell game this subversion sets in motion is fascinating to unravel, but it calls into question the reasons why Kantor paints.

Four medium-sized paintings set the show’s tone. These works foreground the other pieces in the exhibition; three greet viewers as they enter the main space, and another starts off the works in the smaller rear gallery. Painted in flat dusky tones of red, black, and white, their predominantly geometric compositions are sourced from segments of film leader.^[2] Their filmic origin is not immediately apparent, but, as in many of Kantor’s works, this information lies embedded parenthetically in their titles. Their spare compositions evoke minimalist, color-field, and text-based pieces. Like text works, their flat matte surfaces feel physically incidental, as if they could be repainted at a future date on some other canvas with no loss of substance. This quality is strange to find in paintings that clearly evidence the artist’s hand.

Painting from photographs or film stills is commonplace in current practice, but using film’s incidental artifacts rather than its captured images short-circuits this practice’s implied realism. Paintings made from lens-based images are typically assumed to cleave, at least partially, to the reality that their source material depicts. Kantor’s film-leader paintings, on the other hand, convert one medium’s incidental marks into another’s intentional gestures. This recapitulation converts an accidental image into a calculated simulacrum.

This translation is reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s two- and three-dimensional works that depict the image of a brushstroke in his signature comic-book style. Kantor’s paintings lack Lichtenstein’s humor, but they similarly convert a media-specific mark from substance into content. Unlike Lichtenstein, Kantor does not stylize the natural mark he is aping but seeks to reproduce it faithfully through another means. This interpolation destabilizes the images’ referents and forces the works to operate in undetermined limbo.

Kantor’s paintings are clearly not about the way they are painted—their surfaces, colors, textures, or combined effects. Nor are they about the works’ allusions, narratives, or depicted realities. Instead Kantor’s paintings act as placeholders that occupy a painting’s nebulous position within the various intentions, materials, and processes that

Untitled (film leader, partie), 2010; Untitled (film leader, red 3), 2010; Untitled (film leader, red 2), 2010; Untitled (builder), 2006 [partial view]; installation view.  Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Untitled (surgery collage), 2009-2010; “Untitled (x-ray photograph),” 2009; installation view.  Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

make painting possible. Kantor not only affords this position no special significance, he calls its autonomy into question through the other works that he presents.

Three of these pieces are the paint-encrusted, wax-paper palettes that Kantor used to make his 2008‑2009 Lens Flare paintings. Mounted on sections of board, these bits of studio detritus are offered up in this show as oil paintings in their own right. Ironically, the palettes’ blue and white mixing marks and goopy impastos offer richer visual stimuli than Kantor’s intentional paintings. 

Kantor’s “Untitled (x-ray photograph)” (2009) counterbalances the Lens Flare palettes’ deadpan paint by photographically depicting everything about a painting except the paint. A life-sized chromogenic print of an X-rayed canvas, its ghostly image clearly displays a painting’s complete material structure—canvas, stretcher bars, staples, reinforcing plates, and hanging hardware. But is that a painting?

Untitled, 2010; mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Kantor’s other non-painted works similarly blur the line between painting and painting’s materials by taking up image-making processes as their subject matter. Kantor’s slide projections of studio snapshots present mundanely conglomerated materials, finished works, and packaging as works themselves. The untitled installation in Ratio 3’s storage closet gives these incidental materials physical presence, but it complicates them further by illuminating them with the projected image of another painting. This imagistic overlay positions all the included elements as interchangeable points in an ever-progressing line. 

Similarly, Kantor’s Untitled (working space) (2006/2009) takes the very flaws of trial-and-error iteration as its subject matter. Imperfectly struck from the same plate, each print exhibits haphazard registration and inconsistent ink densities. Fingerprints and smudges mar all of them, and one even bears the annotation “proof 1” with penciled notes indicating future changes to take into consideration. The image they depict is incidental compared to the slippage and variation between them.

In his exhibition at Ratio 3, Jordan Kantor has deftly tuned painting’s various aspects until they exactly counterbalance each other. This equalization renders all elements equally important. However, it makes Kantor’s paintings little more than empty vessels, no more significant than the materials used to produce them or the means through which they are documented. In contrast, the pieces that are not paintings—despite the fact they help dematerialize Kantor’s painted works—flirt with a fascinating interplay that continually renews itself.

Viewing the show, I sensed that Kantor is still deeply and personally attached to both painting and his identity as a painter. However, it seems that his practice has moved beyond such limitations, perhaps even without him realizing it.

"Jordan Kantor" is on view at Ratio 3 in San Franciso through June 12, 2010.

NOTES:
[1] from Ratio 3 press release. http://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/2010/jordan-kantor?p=pr
[2] a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector.