DAILY PIC: At the Art Basel fair that closed yesterday, there was so much work on view that only the splashiest of it had any chance of making an impact. The one-person show of American artist Paul Sietsema, at Basel’s Kunsthalle, was a wonderful antidote to that art-fair condition. Sietsema’s work is tremendously subtle, and demands the closest of  looking. The two paintings in today’s Daily Pic, for instance, are each made with the stuff they depict. The “hammer” picture, called “Painting for Assembly,” is executed on the back of a vintage work in oils, whose canvas was removed with the help of the hammer and chisel depicted in Sietsema’s painting – and we see those tools immersed in the same paint that the artist actually went on to use to depict them on that canvas. The other picture, titled “Chinese Philosophy Painting”, shows two pots of enamels casually “spilled”, and they too were depicted using the very paint they contain.  In an age where most images lead immaterial lives, Sietsema told me that he’s keen on doubling down on paintings as material things that have to get made – using hammers and nails and pots of color. And yet, unlike most matter-based pictures, Sietsema’s are also crammed full of ideas.

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