Passion in Paint Chips
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
While Robert Rauschenberg famously said that collage is the drawing mode of the 20th century, traditional kinds of drawing — lines on paper — have nonetheless persisted and thrived over the last 100 years. To many, though, drawing is always a fusion of means. For two artists currently on view — Harry Roseman at Davis & Langdale and Jon Kessler at the Drawing Center — imposing original marks on appropriated supports signals a knowing collision of the received and the created.
Both artists are known primarily for their work in three dimensions, and this makes it apposite that they should bring together different formal and strategic components in their work on paper. Sculpture, after all, entails describing the world in the round rather than in a flattened out mode. As it happens, however, both artists actively exploit the dynamics of flatness.
In this regard, both are involved in a kind of sculpture that flips back and forth between the volumetric and the planographic. Mr. Roseman is best known for work in bas-relief, working, for instance, in painted fired clay to render a fluttering cloth in solid sculptural form. Mr. Kessler devises machines that are simultaneously high-tech and goofy in their improvisation; often the experience of video in physically overloaded space forces an uncomfortable realization of the incompatibility of flat mediation and real life.
Mr. Roseman is showing, for the first time, a series of 100 graphic works he made between 1993 and 1994 titled “100 Most Popular Colors.” The starting point for each piece is the same paint color chart put out by Cook & Dunn Interior Finishes (the line is discontinued, which accounted for the ease with which he was able to procure so many of the test cards). Each piece is 11-inches-by-24 3/4 inches, and the majority leave intact the manufacturer’s name and the blurb either side of it.
The ground from which Mr. Roseman’s variations and explorations proceed is a spectral grid of color and shades with their trade names and code numbers printed underneath. This is the basic DNA structure from which members of an extended family struggle to assert their individuality. Varyingly, pieces retain or obliterate all or some of the color, and marks play with or against the support. Even in cases where a shape or structure militates against the underlying order, a sense of the grid survives. Commercial color names are uniquely semiotic in that they are at once prosaic and poetic, aiming simultaneously to identify accurately and to entice and seduce. Thus, any sequence of four such names will sound both banal and exotic in equal measure: “Pink Frost, Sahara, Soft Peach, Desert Beige.” This duality informs — or at least perfectly complements — Mr. Roseman’s own aesthetic, which combines expressive individuality and a compulsion for order and logic.
A typology of images emerges in the course of the series. Some images concentrate a specific, repeating mark on each of the little cubes. “#50,” for instance, has the same basket weave meticulously drawn in black ink on each color cube so that there is the illusion of the weave continuing across the whole page, but only visible where there is color. In other works, Mr. Roseman varies the mark, as if each responds to the color on which it is imposed: “# 48” has a similar boomerang shape positioned on the center of the cube, but the orientation or bulge varies; “# 45” has relatively crudely drawn cubes from different perspectives within each sample cube.
Some compositions tease the grid by imposing bigger imagery that cuts across the individual cubes: In “# 53” some of each cube is whited out so that big Xs cut across the page. In some, such as “# 51,” Mr. Roseman paints over everything except the color samples. In variations of this strategy, he paints over the colors, too, say in gray, but in a tonal variety that acknowledges the spectrum that has been obliterated. And then there are pieces such as “# 26” that virtually ignore the underlying structure and apply a loose painterly wash over the whole page which nonetheless allows glimpses of the color cubes underneath, as the samples are in fact laid on paper of different texture that resists the wash to a different degree.
The relief sculptor in Mr. Roseman comes to the fore in one piece, “#84,” that also exemplifies the extremity of the artist’s obsession, his seemingly masochistic willingness to see an idea through to its end. In this piece he has peeled off each applied color sample with a knife and then stuck the removed swatch in its new curling state back to its spot on the grid.
This sense of being able to see the grid in so many different guises, often extreme disguises, relates Mr. Roseman’s eccentric project to Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock cycle, “100 Famous Views of Edo” (1856–58).
And in his exhaustive, relentless sense of variation, he recalls a classic dictum of Jasper Johns that epitomizes the nonchalant solipsism of the creative artist isolated in his or her studio: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” The encyclopedic nature of his endeavor also recalls Gerhard Richter’s ongoing expanding grid piece, “The Atlas.”
For Hiroshige, life revolves around a sacred national monument: Mount Edo. For Mr. Roseman, expressive and imaginative possibilities — all the formal and procedural variety that he can muster — work within and against the most ubiquitous signifier of modernist reduction: the grid — a sacred monster of sorts.
Mr. Kessler’s strange, dark images take on other kinds of sacred monsters — or their fashion-era twins: profane angels. His art entails angry commentary of the role of celebrity and glamour amid a correspondingly dystopian, violent world order. This compact display of 17 works includes a number made during a residency at the experimental paper mill, Dieu Donné, earlier this year.
Mr. Kessler’s technique entails collage of disturbingly visceral expressivity. His imagery splices together political figures — presidents Putin and Ahmadinejad — and fashion models and celebrities. There is almost a gendered opposition here in which male equals power and female equals glamour, although there are occasional crossovers of gender, with glimpses, for instance, of Condoleezza Rice.
While the collage elements are legible enough, his magazine source materials are distressed in a bizarre way, somehow churned in with paper pulp to produce a weird, rough, damaged pictorial surface — it almost looks masticated. Some works involve painting over the photographic imagery in a childlike, scatological hand, often scrawling obscene language to complete the denigration.
“Blue Man #3” (2007) is a Frankenstein-like assemblage of facial features, recalling English pop artist Richard Hamilton’s satirical rendering of a Labour Party leader, “Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a FamousMonsterofFilmland”(1964). The gruesome, wasted quality of Mr. Kessler’s paper, with its dense physicality, stands in contrast to the smooth, clean aesthetic of fashion photography. Sometimes this is enhanced further by the addition of body hair to impose extremes of aging and decay to images of serenity and beauty.
The show is permeated by sinister violence. In terms of both mutation and physical condition, it is as if the faces have undergone nuclear attack.
Roseman until October 20 (231 E. 60th St., between Second and Third avenues, 212-838-0333);
Kessler until October 25 (35 Wooster St., between Grand and Broome streets, 212-219-2166).