Simon Linke "Paintings"

‘Jasper Johns painted the American flag: pop art. Reality and image are superimposed; the American flag is immediately recognizable, but it doesn’t hang or flutter like a real flag. It is meticulously copied on the flat surface. Pop artists took ordinary and everyday images and transposed them in art. Now, two decades later, artists no longer use everyday life as their only source but also the reality of art. Art is more than ever bound up with business and because of this, various new phenomena have acquired an important place in the art circuit. For example the expensive advertisements in leading art magazines that also give these a status. The artist’s name in combination with the name of the gallery can for insiders have a bearing on the prestige both of the artist and the gallery. Quite a few people leaf through art magazines mainly for the advertisements. The American artist ED Ruscha conceived the form of Artforum. Square, with a grid as basic form, it is sometimes viewed as the printed equivalent of the gallery space. The square pages are sometimes divided into two horizontal halves, or into four squares or into four strips. The space in between the letters is wide, which gives these advertisements a degree of abstraction. The Englishman Simon Linke (1958) paints copies of advertisements in Artforum, seemingly without any additions: only the brush-strokes are visible, now and then. A traditional medium, that renders visible something that is already visible. An apparently superfluous product, but carried out by hand and with craftsmanship. Linke's work makes you realize the meaning of images in our contemporary life. Even more than pop art did, it stresses the significance of reproduction and of the logo inside the world of art. Art can no longer exist without advertising, a mechanism Simon Linke succeeds in reversing and appropriating.’ (‘Reversing a mechanism’, Newsletter De Appel, 3 (1988) 3.)