Israel Lund at David Lewis

Israel Lund is one of the newly celebrated painters working within their own distinctive kind of post-digital abstraction. Taking the silk-screening process as inspiration, the artist created an installation consisting of two large paintings along with more than a dozen thin rectangular silk-screened sculptures. The silk screens—as mysterious as faceless sentries and as inviting as portals to another dimension—were framed in brightly colored aluminum with Lund’s digitally realized marks permanently frozen on them.

The paintings themselves were the purest of abstractions. Lund uses a phone app to make his digital forms and then silk-screens the results, allowing chance to dictate the outcomes. Lines and markings on a digital screen become marks on silk screens, and then, occasionally, they make their way onto canvas. It is that in-between state that Lund seemed most intent upon achieving. His smudged paintings have the qualities of photocopies and carbon-paper transfers. Lund disrupts these works by adding vertical stripes to sections of the canvases. The final prodcuts, which evoke such artists as Martin Kippenberger and Daniel Buren, at once reveal and obscure their inspiration. Pure thought doesn’t necessarily have to become an idea, the painter seems to be saying. Actions might speak louder than brushstrokes.

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 116.