The Brooklyn Rail

In the early seventies Sol LeWitt was invited to work and exhibit in the Torre Bonomo, formerly known as the Torre Vecchia, a medieval tower in the Umbrian town of Spoleto managed by the gallerist Marilena Bonomo. The traces of his stay, still visible today, are site-specific pencil wall drawings that explore the exhaustion of geometric forms through various combinations. These drawings display LeWitt’s trial-and-error working method while revealing the delicacy of his artistic process.

Building on this foundation, the British artist Jonathan Monk completed a residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto last winter. Paralleling LeWitt’s wall drawings, Monk responded to LeWitt’s practice by subtly revisiting some of his frameworks, concepts, and objects. The dialogue between the two artists is rooted in Monk’s interest in appropriation, a practice he embraced upon realizing “that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.”

While Monk has used appropriation to make critical and humorous commentaries—as in Deflated Inflated (2009), where he captured Jeff Koons's Rabbit (1986) in various stages of deflation to undermine its monumentality—the reproduction of LeWitt’s work in this exhibition is celebratory. By transposing LeWitt’s work in other mediums, such as in the series of short animation films created by capturing his bookworks and reconceiving them as still images, Monk seems to be attempting to both honor and progress LeWitt’s work. The result is an optical illusion, where viewers are seemingly viewing flicking pages, but the pages are projected images whose dimensions match the original books. To achieve this visual effect, Monk revealed that some of the books were destroyed in the process, raising questions about the role of digital techniques in conservation practices.

The exhibition’s illusionary character is further reinforced by the series of ceramic sculptures titled Sol LeWitt Rules, in which Monk created a clay edition of 100 reproductions of a wooden ruler, gifted to him by the gallerist Yvon Lambert, and believed to have been left behind by LeWitt twenty years ago after installing an exhibition in Paris. While LeWitt’s ruler was presumably used to make precise lines, Monk’s rulers lack numbers and linearity, losing the utility inherent to that object. However, what endures—and is thus intensified—is the idea of the object as a catalyst for artistic expression, central to Monk’s conceptual practice. In fact, close-up fragmented images of Sol LeWitt Rules are the subject of Monk’s new artist book, published on the occasion of the exhibition. This book revisits LeWitt’s flip book framework but replaces the movement of geometric forms with the descending ceramic ruler, which appears almost entirely abstract in this context.

The dialogue with the seemingly abstract extends to the series Sol always shines (nine books from my library), where Monk reproduced the spines of LeWitt’s art books from his personal library as miniature versions in wood covered in gold leaf. Although the sculpture’s forms appear abstract, their triangular shape, brilliant color, and elevated positioning resemble religious icons, functioning as an homage to LeWitt’s artist books while elevating the act of contemplating a library to contemplating an altar. The spiritual ascent of the exhibition is further guided by music playing from the top floor, where a cassette deck plays a selection of LeWitt’s tapes left in his Spoleto studio, beneath a pencil portrait of LeWitt by Monk.

Monk’s hand truly shines is in his Restaurant Drawings, an ongoing series that started in 2015 in Italy by drawing seminal artworks onto paper receipts and selling them through Instagram posts for the price of the meal. Often priced at less than $100, this simple gesture not only secured a meal for the artist and his family but also playfully comments on the saturated and opaque art market and the impact of social media platforms. Over the years this series has referenced several artists, but in SL the receipts illustrate LeWitt’s works and function as evidence for the development of Monk’s exhibition. Showcasing the paradigm that the best ideas arise over a meal or coffee, these two receipts serve as proof of the initial conversations with the exhibition’s curator, Vittoria Bonifati, over coffee in Rome. The second receipt, a handwritten note from a local restaurant composed of a series of numbers in a column, testifies to Monk’s presence and engagement with the local community of Spoleto. One can only wonder what the receipt of a meal between Monk and LeWitt would look like—probably a series of lines and shapes would replace numbers.