For some time now Laszlo Romer's art has activated the space between the Scylla of reductive abstraction and the Charybdis of decorative excess. With 1L3P Romer presents us with "an Archetype of a living space", an abstraction of an ordinary room with walls, floor and furnishings of a sort. Yet the work is also engaging with the history of painting generally and more pointedly the position of reductive abstraction in contemporary art. What kind of living space is it? If , as Adolf Loos categorically stated "ornament is crime", then Romer's installation 1L3P is perhaps an anamorphic prison-house within which the endgames of abstractions are played out, not as denouement but as a kind of prologue.

While the convex mirror deployed in 1L3P echoes the use of such devices as low-tech surveillance tools, it also reminds me of a work from the very beginning of the history of oil painting - Jan Van Eyck's Betrothal of the Arnolfini (1434). In that picture Van Eyck has depicted a convex mirror in the back of the room, reflecting the backs of the married couple standing in the foreground acting as something of an advertisement for his virtuoso painterly technique.

In Van Eyck's time oil painting could be considered a relatively 'new media'. Today it has been dramatically impacted by subsequent revolutions in imaging technology - printmaking, photography, film, television digital media. As such, Romer's detournment of michrofiche cards into proto-wallpaper is also enlightening. Just as oil paintings were once the dominant source of visual imagery, microfiche were a favourite tool of archivists and librarians, storing vast amounts of information - from old newspapers to updates of card catalogues. In 1L3P these cards are stripped of their informational character and exist simultaneously as decoration, proto-paintings and as a marker of technological change.

Like the title of the work, 1L3P, each of its elements is deceptively simple-encoded, reduced, categorized. Yet that simplicity is betrayed at every turn, its reductiveness paradoxically opening up to more and more associations. Just as Y2K is a kind of digital shorthand for the year 2000, it marks a vast field of panic and future dreams. Like Y2K, 1L3P draws our attention to a set of material and temporal facts which only accrue meaning through further associations. Reflections on a mirror perhaps?

1L3PY2K, Trevor Smith, Perth 1999

1L3P : Gertrude contemporary art spaces 1999