Let’s be honest. Let’s really put it all out there so we’re not pretending it isn’t a thing: bricks are not that exciting. But ever since Carl Andre did his thing back in 1974 (a famous sculpture of neatly arranged bricks called ‘Equivalent VIII’) and the tabloids lost their shit about how this was the death of art, bricks have been big art business.
Maria Taniguchi, for example, is an award-winning young Filipino artist and she absolutely bloody loves bricks. Her show here consists of eight black paintings of what look like brick walls. Each is a massive dark canvas covered in meticulous faint white rectangular marks. Some of the shapes are fainter than the others, creating an effect similar to spotting new bricks in an old wall. And the size of the canvases varies slightly too. But other than that, it’s all just bricks really.
So why should you care? Because Taniguchi has managed to make these simple, slab-like paintings into something deeply intense. These works are labours of love for the artist, she pores over them, spends hours perfecting every detail. They’re minimal, solemn and quite beautiful. They’re as much about the process of making them – of painstakingly and precisely drawing the tight geometric shapes – as the pleasingly meditative and minimal result.
The works are about shapes fitting neatly together, they even seem to fit with each other, becoming a huge, dark, impenetrable wall and, oh bugger, I think I like paintings of bricks all of a sudden.
Go with Taniguchi on her builder’s journey of introspection, smash down some of your own preconceptions, and you just might like it too.