I did not want to like this one.
I was handed it on a Tuesday, between meetings with myself, and told only that it had been generated from "a can of Stella Artois thrown into a bush." I prepared my face for disappointment. My face, I am sorry to report, was not needed.
On First Encounter
The work assaults the eye with a confidence its origins do not deserve. Acid greens lunge across the canvas like opinions at a dinner party. Electric blues pool and run, dripping toward the lower edge with the slow inevitability of a regret. There is, in the upper left, the faintest ghost of a figure in a hat: a witness, perhaps, or the lager itself, contemplating its descent.
It should not work. A discarded can. A bush. And yet.
What the Committee Saw
- Velocity. The diagonals refuse to settle. The piece is in motion, as the can surely was, mid-arc, catching the light before the foliage claimed it.
- The drips. Magnificent. Each vertical run a small elegy for a beverage that never asked to be art and will never know that it became it.
- Restraint, of a kind. The white ground keeps the chaos legible. A lesser bush would have produced mud.
The Verdict
This is what we mean when we speak of the Unremarkable Sublime. A moment of suburban littering, elevated (through no fault of its own) into a composition I would not be embarrassed to hang near the kettle.
I award it four out of five reluctant nods. The fifth nod is withheld on principle, because a can of Stella Artois should not be allowed to feel too good about itself.
You may view the piece in full, and scan its provenance, should you wish to confront the truth.
Nigel Ponceby-Smythe, Critic-in-Residence, against his better judgement