Catalogue Essay by Margaret Moore

• Since launching his Trilogy project Enigma: A Suite of Variations in 1996, Janis Nedela has worked to unravel a self-initiated creative journey across three exhibitions. His departure point being the book, Has Modernism Failed? by Suzi Gablik. Some six years later in this finale, Nedela demonstrates most boldly the inherent paradox in his work and the complexities of his project.
  With this exhibition he moves away from the preferred materials of previous exhibitions, that saw him incorporate into his work his tools such as pencils, crayons, their shavings and other found or manufactured items, for example, nails, golf tees and paper clips. He returns to purist painting, thereby honouring (or is it perpetuating?) the predominant visual language of Modernism fundamentally at question by Gablik.
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  The latest paintings rely on the seductions of surface, colour, grids, and patterns, operating both optically and contemplatively. In appearance the paintings recall a lineage of pivotal modern artists of the twentieth century. The use of primary colours and their derivations to define formalism may be attributable to the Dutch artists Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. The rhythmic patterns of dots reliant on subtlety of shifts of depth and colour relationships could be reminiscent of Jennifer Bartlett or Alfred Jensen. The optical potential of these works has in part been informed by the emphases of artists such as Victor Vasarely. Even the exaggerated vinyl pencil sculptures allude to the ‘soft furnishings’ sculptures of Claes Oldenburg or more recently that of Yayoi Kusama in her Pop inspired fabrications.
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  Within this context these paintings share a discernible modernist sensibility or conventionality. This brings a deceptive ease of engagement to the exhibition as a whole, on the strength of established or acceptable visual painting languages. Yet far from diminishing the impact of the exhibition this air of comparative art historical comfort is rather disarming.
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  Herein lies the real complexity of Nedela’s ambitious project. The works are not necessarily as they appear. While Nedela would acknowledge the inheritance of modernist artists the works remain obsessively linked to the book and the very nature of text and representation. The works, particularly these paintings, are highly personalised to the extent they are self-referential. Every mark made, every dot applied is derived to systematically exist as a coded word from the Gablik text. Even more intensely, the resultant "images" of these paintings is also determined by characteristics of the printed word. In Nedela’s code, attention has been given to variances of fonts, point sizes, bold type, plain type and so forth. The flat painting appearance therefore belies a defined though ‘illegible’ content. It is additionally confounding that this illegible content is concerned with the visual depiction of language. The paintings are representational or depictional in a minimal and abstracted form, but they are also mute.
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  With knowledge of how thee works are contrived, it is possible to suggest that Nedela’s entire project is in part aligned with Systemic Art so-called in the 1960s by Lawrence Alloway, because of its strategic orderliness combined with its referential nature. So as not to consider this exhibition, only in terms of art historical semantics and game playing (although Nedela is acutely in control of such games), it is worth considering the sensitivities of the latest works.
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  The paintings have been susceptible to human inexactness due to way Nedela has worked and has constructed this body of work. In the two largest multiple-panelled paintings (#41 and #42) the marks have a temporal value, as evidence of the passage of time in their making. Delicately, uneven lines and subtle shifts in depth of pigment, track the capacity of human minds and hands to do continuous work. The ebbs and flows of the paintings are a direct correlation of the artist’s state of mind, energy level, degree of precision or impact of external forces such as light or music. It is also important to note that Nedela has used the heads of pins or pieces of dowel to apply dots and allowed for the inconsistencies this has brought to bear on the work. All in all this brings an arresting quality to the paintings despite their obvious painstaking effort.
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  This final exhibition in the trilogy offers greater revelations with the inclusion of the studies for the entire 49 works of the project. These provide an absorbing and intimate catalogue of the process of ideas and their realisation. Ultimately this exhibition is one of harmonies and aesthetics as well as systems, perhaps acknowledging and grappling with some of Gablik’s claims against Modernism. We are not to know what passages of her text Nedela has elected to encode and how critical this is. That remains personal further underlining the dualities within the project and affirming that ENIGMA: A Suite of Variations has proved to be an apt and justly poetic title.

Margaret Moore July 2002