Painting on Canvas (C.202) is the most self-referential work in Roy Lichtenstein's Paintings Series — a print depicting a painting that was itself a depiction of a painting's surface, the canvas texture visible in the depicted work, the layers of representation accumulated into a picture that was simultaneously a print, a depicted painting, and an image of the act of painting. The woodcut marks Lichtenstein used to render the canvas texture introduced a physical quality that corresponded, in the most material way, to the physical texture of the depicted subject.

The painting within the picture was non-representational — a field of abstract marks and gestural forms that recalled Abstract Expressionism without directly reproducing any specific work. By making a print of an abstract painting, Lichtenstein repeated a gesture he had made throughout his career: taking the conventions of a specific painterly tradition and examining them from the outside, through his own terms. The abstract painting within the print was as much a citation as a depiction — a way of asking what abstraction looked like when rendered through the conventions of the printed multiple.

The combination of woodcut, lithograph, screenprint, and collage that characterised the Paintings Series gave each work a material complexity that matched its conceptual layering. Painting on Canvas (C.202) was the most materially elaborate in this respect — the canvas texture, the painted marks, the frame, and the wall on which it hung all present as distinct elements, each requiring different processes to render, the technical ambition in service of a proposition that was, in the end, straightforward: a print of a painting, examined with full attention.

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