John Henderson’s oeuvre has long revolved around the problematic
of modernism, abstraction, and the painterly gesture. In this sense,
he could possibly be situated in the context of a larger wave of processbased
abstraction in recent years, one that is marked by the flatness
of the picture plane, a preoccupation with process, and improvised
gestures indexing the real. As the critic David Geers has argued,
this trend is “in equal parts, a generational fatigue with theory; a growing
split between hand-made artistic production and social practice;
and a legitimate and thrifty attempt to ‘keep it real’ in the face of an
ever-expansive image culture and slick ‘commodity art’.”1
Yet what sets Henderson apart is his reflexive distance to the painterly,
putting the romance of the authorial gesture and the assumption
of an unproblematic spectatorship into question. On the one hand,
the artist admits the performative element to his work, but…