In Tony Just’s new series of paintings, Madame Bovary, C’est Moi, frottage becomes the modus operandi, with each painting producing the next in a closed system of internally-oriented automatism. A pool of thick black gesso is poured onto the first sharp-cornered canvas, and another fresh canvas is dragged across its surface, then another across that one, and so on. Doing away with such extraneous elements as brush, composition and thought, the brute process itself becomes machine and methodology, while the canvas is both tool and product. The result is a frieze of stuttering imagery, smears of inky, Rorschach-like marks; slides of time and signs of contact. The thirty same-sized, self-replicating canvases are like animated film cells that don’t quite fit together, or pages of a book leafed through at speed. Both utterly simple and impossibly dense, they speak at once of the desire to make a clear mark, and the clutter of references that adhere automatically to any such mark.

The self-evidence of Tony Just’s chosen methodology brings to mind what French affichiste Raymond Hains once said of his own work: “My works existed before me, but nobody had seen them, because they were blindingly obvious.” Like Hains, Tony Just’s work begins on the streets, borrowing from flyers and self-made posters hanging on lampposts, or objects found in flea markets or left on street corners. It pictures what we see, know and feel of a city as it slides into and out of view. Tony Just tests the realism of the city by borrowing its surfaces and sampling its residues as memories, imprints or movements. Borrowings of borrowings of borrowings are transposed in pastels where shapes of color coalesce into an image, a pattern, a face. Why not make a picture, they ask? Or, can images make themselves?

Tony Just chose to title the show and the paintings after Gutave Flaubert’s well known quote about the character he created for his novel Madame Bovary: “Towards the end of the book, there is a moment after Emma Bovary has died and she has been dressed for the funeral, when they lift her veil to see her face. Suddenly, black bile starts flowing out of her mouth. A perfectly awful beautiful image which left me identifying with Madame and Flaubert. Hence the title,Madame Bovary, C’est Moi.”

Tony Just (1969 USA) lives and works between Berlin and New York. He exposed his works in many important private galleries around the world: New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Zurich, Los Angeles, London. He exhibited in 2005 at PS1. His works are presented in Phaidon's book "Painting Abstraction - New Elements in Abstract Painting - The definitive (and only) guide to contemporary abstract painting" by Bob Nickas.