Mediete 1981

This is "Mediete", by Aurelie Nemours, made using paint on canvas. At first glance, the grid of blue, yellow, red, and black rectangles might seem like a purely intellectual exercise, but the material reality of paint and canvas brings it down to earth. Look closely, and you can see that the colour is not uniform. There is texture in the brushstrokes, and that means it was made by hand. This is not a slick, mass-produced object, but the result of careful, skilled labour. Nemours was clearly interested in a minimalist aesthetic, but she also understood that the hand can never be completely erased. In this tension, there is an echo of wider social issues. How much control do we really have over the production processes that surround us? Nemours pushes against this, asking us to consider not just the final image, but also the work that went into it. Ultimately, "Mediete" is a reminder that even the most abstract art is rooted in the physical world, in the act of making.