The Brooklyn Rail

In Kapp Kapp’s Canon, nine works circumvent fine art’s canonical dispositions through painterly and photographic discourse, and broadcast the optical and imagerial techniques behind Thomas Blair, Kunning Huang, and Waseem Nafisi’s fluctuating print and scan-centric methods. In postmodernist jest, these works erase material boundaries and thrust the artists’ technical processes to the forefront, especially those that depend on the household-name printer manufacturer eponymous with the show’s title.

Thomas Blair’s Crashed Car (Flat) (2024) shows a split, jack-hammered vehicle, stained in bruise, lava, and translucent-black shades of ink that skid fully around the canvas edge. Grimy washes of oil splatter across a punctured tire, a remnant of a torn-to-shreds write off, abandoned to oxidize and rot. The velvety but scattered dark tones of the cropped car’s shadowy underbelly undulate crosswise, corresponding to the hopeful light glinting off the metals of the scrapyard-bound object. Intricate, dappled markings on the gravel beneath the car, as well as tiny, line-stroked chips of car paint, or simply dirt, eloquently introduce devices of conscious layering, and play with ideas of flatness. The artist indulges in a self-coined “inside-out trompe-l’oeil” effect, where layers of ink are built up to look like paint on the work’s surface, creating a deceptive illusion to the sequencing of printing passes, and to the texture of Crashed Car (Flat). Co-dependent on the brightness, porosity, and weft of the canvas, while in full control of digital calibrations and designation of light, Blair derails the constructional integrity of his vehicles through all sorts of pre- and post-production accidentals, including those specific to his large-format Epson 900.

White Car Crash (2024), Blair’s most substantial work to date, recalls White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times) (1963), one of the largest single-panel paintings ever produced by Andy Warhol for his “Death and Disaster” series. Blair’s drunkenly registered prints vividly multiply and blur across his canvas, not unlike Warhol’s repetitive and increasingly smudged silk screens, and collide in a monochromatic tragedy inspired not from shocking newspaper headlines, but regurgitated from endlessly vast and disastrous examples of AI.

Kunning Huang’s violated symbols depart from any one point of origin after artificially enforced scrutiny, and guest feature in tessellated assemblages of upscaled and off-kilter landscapes. Calligraphically sleek and stylized grass shoots sprout and dart across rice paper, to which resin is also sometimes applied, imprinting culturally significant iconography and illustrations across quaint, ominously colored compositions.

Untitled (nature of art) (2024) draws inspiration from the botanical references in Jieziyuan Huazhuan, otherwise known as the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, which was a compilation of Chinese paintings produced during the early Qing Dynasty. First published in 1679 in five colors, the manual serves as one of the initial and most important examples of color printing. Woodblock printed copies of the manual were subsequently produced during Japan’s Edo period, and became readily accessible to the intellectual Nanga painters of the time. Indulging in this analog approach, Huang uses a modified Canon printer to produce segments of his image onto transparencies. These are then pressed and transferred onto multiple soft and fibrous rice paper sheets, rasterized and sequenced to construct his final composition. Huang’s disintegrative reproductions of dragonflies, moon-shaped orbs, and shadow-casted puddles crafted from Adobe-enhanced imagery, generated through repetitive clicks and demands, reduce his ancient and delicate sources into mere relapsing vectors. Approaching the work closely, his grainy details of flora and fauna gradually dissolve into an abstract and untraceable diaspora of their own.

Scanned in ultra-high definition, a crate smeared with paint lays atop a warped, scanned, and cropped rendition of Kazimir Malevich’s Running Man (ca. 1932), a seminal painting created only three years before the Suprematist painter’s demise. The reds, yellows, blues, and whites of Waseem Nafisi’s Second Impressions (after Malevich) (2023) follow the formal suites of its supporting monographic study, ebbing into Malevich’s diagonal road, known to represent a fleeing path for the Soviet citizens during dekulakization—a campaign under Stalin’s Second Revolution that persecuted wealthy peasants (1929–1932). Nafisi’s work, an assemblage of miniature pieces of wood, obstructs the legibility of layers, and calls attention to the other surface interferences. A 2-by-4-foot stretcher bar thrusts through both this work and Bar Peasants (after Malevich) (2023). Here, the wood horizontally bisects three vibrant, linen-clad figures, while the plank’s bulging effect extrudes Nafisi’s printed imagery from behind, revealing an adopted “reverse trompe-l’oeil” technique of his own, enhancing the overall sense of agitation and resistance inherent to his structures.

Digitally manipulated imagery—Blair’s cars, Huang’s seventeenth-century flora, and Nafisi’s riffs on Malevich—soak directly into or onto rice paper, canvas, and linens in manners that ignore a printer’s paper tray, or scanning bed size restrictions. The Cooper Union trio blend inkjet printing’s limitless reproductive capabilities with a meticulous selection of resources from wildly diverse points of reference, sourced both on and offline. Whether borrowed from archives or artificially produced, the manipulation of substrates and symbols across the works in Canon allow for fresh attachments to form—a collective, time(less)stamp.