"That’s how art works: you think of an idea that challenges a prior conception, and if you succeed in that, it becomes interesting." This is how Josh Sperling puts it, and over 3-floors of his twisting and puzzle-like canvas sculptural works, he challenges the idea of what is a painting and what is a sculpture. But we already know that, as Sperling has been conceptualizing this idea for years now, but what makes Daydream at Perrotin so impressie is the range in which he explores this idea, from minimalism to maximalist works, to clusters to great space, to installation and site-specific works.
This is a great anecdote from the gallery: Taped to a small refrigerator in the back of Sperling’s studio in Ithaca, New York is a curling piece of office paper printed with seven bulleted lines of plain type that detail, in the flattest possible terms, how to understand color:
• Hue is color
• Chroma is the purity of a color
• Saturation is how strong or weak a color is
• Value is how light or dark a color is
• Tone is a hue combined with gray
• Shade is a hue combined with black
• Tint is a hue combined with white
What is great about this is that you get a sense of this checklist through the show, but subliminally and quite consciously. Sperling runs the range of colors and shades and shapes in this show, and what is apparent is that he is growing as an installation artist, so much so that this show feels like a museum retrospective than just a gallery show. —Evan Pricco
