Troy Ramaekers’ current exhibition at Footscray gallery Five Walls, titled Double-B Sides, features four deceptively simple paintings. The artist has stretched large canvases, taller than wide, and around the edge of each is a bleeding red border. This border contains a trace of the stretcher behind the canvas as well as the ground, where the artist has pressed down with a squeegee of some kind to make a print or a frottage of both the support and the floor. The result shows a compelling residue of the texture of the floor, the shadow of the stretcher bars and the layering of the block printing ink on the unprimed canvas. Questions about process and materiality merge with questions about meaning: has the canvas has been stretched before, inverted on the ground, painted and then re-stretched in reverse? Are these prints of themselves as much as of the ground? The result is a striking image that is both a print and a painting inside-out, a doubling of the usual relation between printing block and print.
