Untitled

Like many of Diao’s works, this one has a touch of playful irony. Although inspired by a rejection of the ideal of seeing the “painter’s hand,” with careful looking this work clearly reveals it. The viewer mentally relives the moments of production, imagining the squeegee sliding across the paper, pausing slightly just before the midpoint, then lifting off the paper at the bottom to leave a small trail of drips.

In the late 1960s, David Diao began to experiment with using tools other than brushes to paint. In a 2015 interview he recalled, “The whole phenomenon was a reaction against the exuberance of de Kooning and Franz Kline, against that expressive hand, the painterly touch, and so forth…. A way out of that was, for many of us, to come up with other means of getting the paint onto the canvas. People used rollers, others used scrapers, sponges, turkey basters. I was mostly using a six-inch squeegee, a car washer, since it gave me a two-and-a-half-foot extension.”