In front of them hang two pairs of diptychs. In them, purely from memory, Bottrop painted, for the first time, figurative, or rather realistic, images of barbed wire running horizontally and vertically across the canvases. This new painting, abstract yet representational, penetrates into other spaces, maintaining the gestural mode but becoming more ‘impersonal’ and objective in its execution. It is referential to the image it represents and self-referential as a synthesis of all the gestures, lines and knots that have articulated Bottrop’s painting over the years. It is almost a macro gesture of focus, scale and heightened perception that shows barbed wire in detail as a conduit or compositional path of the painting. This new work, alluding to the image, is both pictorial and literal. The idea of representation and its pictorial interpretation, as with Jasper Johns’ early flags, becomes recognisable as an image, thus allowing for a distancing and abstraction of the motif in the direction of a game where contradiction and paradox, irony and allegory coexist. With these paintings entitled ‘Barbed wire’, in a linguistic exercise of textual allusion to the motif represented, Bottrop rethinks certain paradigms, which, in opposition, mediate one of the most essential transformations of our recent art.

From a historical perspective, Bottrop’s painting seems to recreate or revive, in a certain sense, the paradigm of the late 1950s, when the ambiguity of Johns or Stella, or Noland or Louis, united the legacy of the New York School, shredded and deconstructed, with the adoption (innovative at the time) of Duchampian provocation.

While these new works by Bottrop reveal something of the signature brushstroke which has characterised part of his previous paintings, he unexpectedly and suddenly isolates the represented and recognisable image, achieving total abstraction. It is these representational games that make language and image the renovating elements of his recent work.