Laurel Smith
"Laurel Smith" by Mireille Perron, Winter 2008, pp. 121-22
Laurel Smith’s paintings question excess, finding parallels between our contemporary society of overabundance and the 18th-century rococo style. She has coined the term “Ornaminimalism” to describe the combined references to rococo ornamentation and minimalism in her work.
The paintings themselves are based on a motif appropriated from a decorative rococo picture frame. Smith repeats the motif in fragmented form on supports of laser-cut aluminum and Plexiglas of varying sizes. The swirls and curls of the rococo shapes cast shadows within paintings that otherwise keep their hard edges and rectangular shape: The monarchy of the minimal., for instance, adheres to the modernist tenet that a painting is above all a flat, rectilinear surface fastened to the wall at eye level. The colourful and luminous surfaces of Smith’s works are carefully crafted, built from up to 20 successive layers of acrylic paint. In some paintings, such as Bon vivant, Uberous and Voluptuary, the painted layers accumulate like geological strata in the recesses created by the curling shape of the original motif.
As a style, rococo was known for its aristocratic abandon. Smith takes the title of Après nous, le déluge (“after me, the deluge”) from an expression attributed to the 18th-century French courtesan Madame de Pompadour, who reportedly laughed off all criticism of her extravagance with the eponymous phrase. Smith believes that today’s society of excessive consumption and disposable goods is driven by a similar careless destructiveness.
Smith has provided an elegant solution to the question of excess by confining rococo extravagance and her abundantly worked surfaces to austere, industrially made panels. The French theorist Jacques Derrida would describe it as a situation in which excess is sous rature or “under erasure.” The paintings put both of their characteristic elements—rococo excess and the reductivism of minimalism—into this zone of erasure. It is a reminder that the pleasures of excess cannot be simply disavowed and that the reductive purity of minimalism can be a dangerous illusion too. Instead, we are presented with innovative hybrids and invited to identify connections between past and present art practices.
The paintings’ greatest resonance is to be found in those areas of built-up paint that lie within the recesses made by their surface patterning. The paint suggests a condition of being found in between—as it is with our times, which are likewise suspended between no longer and not yet.
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