Painting (with mouse pad) is a sculpture by Harm van den Dorpel consisting of:
1. A framed and matted print of an abstract digital painting (found by Van den Dorpel on the Internet) leaning against a white art gallery wall.
2. A vertically-inverted mouse pad depicting a cliche Chinese landscape painting resting on the top right edge of the painting’s frame.
When combined, the painting and the fan don’t seem to add up to anything. Van den Dorpel has talked about wanting to create images and image combinations that don’t mean anything – that create a certain neutrality. This sounds absurdly simple, but, in fact, it’s difficult. In an image-saturated world, almost every image ends up carrying some clear message or point or symbolic weight. In this work, though, the combination of the images ends up creating a double negative, an unsettling feeling of meaninglessness. The more the viewer tries to create some sort of connection, the more they get trapped in the middle of the work.