Artist Statement
For “The Lead Years” at Gaga the New York-based artist Antek Walczak presents 8 lead silkscreens consisting of texts, link addresses, and malicious code from spam emails circa 2007. The prints are made on 98.783% metallurgical sheet lead primed with a hand-applied vinegar wash. Once mounted on wooden frames, they become metallic dull gray panels that take the shape of paintings. The works draw on numerous associations with lead and its properties, chief among them being toxicity, in the scientific sense of the term and as well referring to certain financial assets, mortgage products, and even psychological-emotional moods. Coupled with spam, toxicity gains the capability of contagion, as thousands of emails flood people's inboxes with simulated personal messages carrying payloads of scams, cons, and viruses. The predominance of stock and refinancing spams in the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis further underpins the toxicity of a period which some markets have referred to as the Golden Years.

Known for its malleability and the way it reacts to organic chemicals, lead harbors a dazzling murkiness, permanently recording on its surface every scratch and impression, whether from its inherent nonuniform structure, a careless fingerprint, or a deliberate gesture during the priming process. These qualities are put in relation to the aforementioned metaphoric and symbolic associations as elements of montage. The works’ picturesque graphical referents, with very obvious, straightforward origins, are manipulated by the artist into crisp visual compositions with faint echoes of constructivism, which are then printed over the neo-Dada chance and process actions inscribed on the support material. What results is a type of abstract writing conjugated as an image, free from the literary trappings of discourse that seem to adorn much of contemporary serious art. With a fondness for wagers and gamesmanship, Walczak challenges the sealed-off circuitry and art-historical complicity of Networked Abstract Painting by risking a dialectical openness towards the actuality of information, culture, and knowledge.