Saturday 24th April until Sunday 4th July 2010 @ Arnolfini, Bristol

Anyone can write a good exhibition guide. Where art is concerned it means a lengthy explanation of the meaning, significance and intention of what gallery visitors actually see. The Arnolfini provides a page and a half of such information about Otto Zitko and Louise Bourgeois’ Me, Myself And I show. Sadly, the first floor gallery of Zitko’s work is so disappointing in comparison to the verbal fireworks of its description.

This exhibition is part of the Lingua Franca project, Arnolfini’s attempt to link its often sparse exhibits to verbal meaning and ‘explore intermediary language’. Intermediary language? What on earth does that even mean? If it means creating the space of non-understanding between expressible meaning and the obscure art that originated it, then they have succeeded. This kind of art is unresolved; shapes of paint and giant words daubed on walls seem to have little in common with the vague complexities of the exhibition guides.

Zitko, we are informed, reveals ‘the spaces in between the lines’. This odd statement implies that the point of art is to look at nothing. A visitor to the gallery might, on the basis of this reasoning, feel that there was little point coming to visit. They would have a good argument. Modernism seeks to challenge the boundary between expression and meaning, to reflect the real world with originality in its characteristically unromantic approach to reality. Zitko’s exhibition, however, just feels lazy.

He displays little imagination in giant blue scribbles of paint on giant white canvasses. The ‘work’ Dear Nora is the peak of this blandness – the two words are the only adornments on one wall of Gallery 1. Why? Good question. The exhibition guide informs us that we are viewing the ‘desire to cover every surface’, so the true mystery remains why Zitko has done just the opposite and left most of the room blank.

In fact, there is little more to say about this. The art is spoilt by its bareness, apparently caused by its desire to remain intensely abstract. The relationship between these splashes of paint and what they mean is so difficult to perceive that the many sentences guiding us around their intended meaning is bewildering rather than helpful. Once again, the Arnolfini proves only that it remains too obscure for most people’s enjoyment. For once it would be refreshing to see something on display that was as complicated as the verbal excess of its description.

www.arnolfini.org.uk

Katy Austin