Michael Corris and Robert Nickas, ‘Punishment and Decoration: Art in an Age of Militant Superficiality’, Artforum, Vol. XXXI, No.8, April, 1993 (Excerpts)

…MC:  …What is lacking in the semiotician’s account of painting is the possibility that there might be a painting - a monochrome by Olivier Mosset, for example - that isn’t a monochrome in any conventional sense.  That is to say, a painting in which the opposition between figuration and abstraction has been neutralized, a kind of trompe l’oeil monochrome, a painting of a “monochrome”.  By the same token, the meaning of a painting by Michael Stubbs, who applies paint with cake decorating tools, might not necessarily be grounded in its “gridness” alone but also, for example, in the associations of this decorative technology.

…MC: For each synthetic category generated on behalf of the oppositional pair “figure/ground” we are proposing a sharp and, by way of the semioticians frame of reference, perverse closure.  The drill is simple: the abuse of the monochrome….
RN: As in Parrino’s work.
MC: The embellishment of the grid to the point of an embarrassing plenitude….
RN: Stubbs.
MC: The degradation of the allover to the point of dissolving its absorptive qualities….
RN: As in Michel Scott’s deliriously optical paintings and, most recently, his oversaturated colour paintings.
MC: And the decorative regress of the mis-en-abime to the point of hallucination, vulgarity, and eroticism.