Gaylen Gerber (b. 1955)

'Gerber has been painting the same conventional still life for years-same color, same size painted in the same place in his studio, and conforming to a restrictive, repetitive system. The subject is painted away, day after day, to achieve a kind of dispassionate equality, disavowing Modernist progress; no painting is bigger or better than any other. Gerber's slavishly followed self-imposed script suppresses meaning and individuality. The impossibility of this task (the very fact of their being handmade precludes the works sameness) signals the paradox of the undecidability of the paintings' apparent abstraction. Indeed, we only register the works identical quality against the expectation of difference; the mechanistic, nonhierarchical comparison of each identical undated panel with its neighbors suggests that all copies can be originals, all originals copies' (J. Russi Kirshner, 'Gaylen Gerber: Renaissance Society', in Artforum, 1992, p. 114).