Tim Ebner’s paintings from the 1980s are to a large degree about production. The objects, more often than not, are multiple—made in bulk—and not unique; and they are made not from antiquated materials like oil paint but from prosaic industrial ones—acrylic, resin, fiberglass, zolatone. They have been stamped by their labor with a traditional morality and a humbleness—they result from an “honest day’s work.” Their brand of honesty lies in the straightforward, no-nonsense approach and in their wanting to be like everything else, plain and popular.

But more labor has gone into them than could ever be read back out as content. Within the mythology of Work—in which much modern painting enthusiastically participates, and into which Ebner’s paintings fall, backwards and shadowlike—this is profanity. Work is never misleading, never obscure. Just the opposite—it is always clear and affirmative, fully accountable and wholly self-evident. No matter if the labor is fully disciplined as in Seurat or Mondrian—painting as knowledge, as technique “perfected into a science” – or if it is undisciplined, as in Pollock or Kline—a passionate outburst, which reads as liberation and freedom, a “working beyond” restrictive conventions—work is always active and progressive and, above all, it is economical. The same goes for painting as it does for industry: minimum input should result in maximum visibility. From this kind of work comes material fact, positive values, and “good” meaning. And what gets eliminated in the process is everything that is wasteful and counterproductive: exotica, indirect reference, allusion, literariness, all the refuse marking a decadent art.

And yet, despite all the effort that’s gone into them, Ebner’s paintings lack any of work’s positive qualities. They have gone far beyond being things worked-over to become instead things overworked. In his paintings from the mid-‘80’s, such as the canvas above, Ebner used a wax-resist process to produce images of brushstrokes that weren’t actually there. Over the course of the '80s his paintings grew increasingly resined and lacquered, recalling more what Roland Barthes once said of plastic, that it is “in essence the stuff of alchemy…less a thing than the trace of a movement.” Work does not leave its mark, does not declare itself in Ebner’s paintings—rather, it gets absorbed. Seen in an endless array of guises, chameleonlike and ultimately unknowable, Ebner’s image of work sheds its ethical overtones to become something much more akin to a Symbolist motif—at times ghostly, at time impenetrable, its is always sensational and exotic, perverse and mesmerizing.

In his very last paintings of the '80s he refined this stunt, cutting down its long, drawn-out gymnastics. Ebner just buffed. Buffing became his new mystery—an invisible labor, a job that aims at its own erasure, that is complete only when it can no longer be detected.

Here's another artwork, by Ned Sokolov, that could be said to deal with labor. Sokolov hired two people, a woman and a man, to paint and repaint the gallery every hour of every day that his show was open. Both moving clockwise, always spaced about half the room apart, she painted the walls white, and he painted the walls black.