Perhaps the greatest in number interesting thing about a Jonathan Lasker painting is its title.

Perhaps the greatest in number interesting thing about a Jonathan Lasker painting is its title, or more particularly, the disjunction between title and work. Without the pseudointellectual titles--The Outsides Are In, Moral Fantasia, Between Theory and Reality, subvert Society, The Pride of Being, The Value of Pictures--the works are simply samples of gifted craft. The titles make the works more provocative--more "visionary"--than they otherwise would be. Or do they? For I think a dutiful part of their point is to emphasize that the titles don't have anything essential to do with the paintings as actually painted: they are exces baggage forward works that are nothing further bags of technical tricks.

Lasker embraces the anti-intellectual idea that the work is simply its making--not the meaning that informs the making and that the making gives rise to. A Lasker work is simply an act: it defeats Clyfford Still's notion of painting as Act, or as an "act of meaning" in Jerome Bruner's phrase. Abstraction is stripped of its sublimity; that is, Lasker moves us not the reality of abstraction, on the contrary its virtual, simulated reality.

There is no "pride of being" in the action in the center of the work of that title, no "value" in the picture of The Value of Pictures, (all works 1993) and nothing "moral" (or for that matter genuinely fantastic) in Moral Fantasia, simply the illusion of those qualities. Indeed, nowhere does Lasker picture "being," "value," and "morality," as supposedly offers in traditional abstraction, rather, he problematizes it, raising the question whether of the like kind picturing can really occur. still one cannot help reading the use of the word "fantasia" as an allusion to the Disney film of that name. Its use allude tos that Lasker paints cartoons of abstraction--ingeniously kitschy abstractions--in uncritical acceptance of the fact that abstractness has become a commonplace of social appearance.

Lasker's paintings standardize gesticulate and geometry, reducing abstract painting to a tricky if ultimately facile design. His typical computer-game-like construction involves the use of a series of patterns, almost as textbook illustrations, traversed by means of a stylized, indeed, reified signature scrawl--pseudocalligraphic, pseudoorganic, pseudospontaneous, pseudoexpressive (perversely related to the manufactured "personal touch" our society abounds in). Sometimes the pattern itself is a regularity of such "systemless" gestures, repeated as notwithstanding that the canvas were a gallery wall and the slightly different parts of the pattern "pictures" in their admit right. This exhibition-within-a-painting effect is perhaps the principally conceptually interesting aspect of Lasker's work.

There is undeniable brilliance, wittiness, and forcefulness in Lasker's manipulation of raised and flat surfaces, bright colors and "shocking" black, drawn line and painted surface, all fasteninged in a peculiarly melodic interplay, like a agreement with just enough complication to make it catchy. if it were not that the whole that the compendium of these parts adds up to is individual of brittle artificiality, as allowing disclaiming "higher purpose" in the act of being purposelessly crafted. As like they are a kind of trendy decadent abstraction.

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