For a time now,
the discussion to the cartooned figure, or the resurgence of illustration in
contemporary art, has been focused most on economic stressors that have
presumably influenced, or brought about, its present stature. The difficulties
with such overmined possibilities are for another essay, because at issue here,
in the newest show at Tomorrow, the illustrated figure and the epistemic
quality of drawing, or design—harking back to our understanding of disegno and de-signare—are combined together in a truly excellent show.
The problem of the hand, and its possible resolution within this show, would be a base criticism – even with the literal projection within Aiello’s work being that of a hand, a rapping sound of fingers clicking against the floor, providing a central momentum to the fragility of form by drawn line – because the hand is not a particularly important component of this show.
The problem of the hand, and its possible resolution within this show, would be a base criticism – even with the literal projection within Aiello’s work being that of a hand, a rapping sound of fingers clicking against the floor, providing a central momentum to the fragility of form by drawn line – because the hand is not a particularly important component of this show.
The show begins
with its title: three dashes “---“ implying at once a line, or three shorter
lines, but also, for many who grew up fascinated by ships and maritime
communication, Morse code. SOS is translated as "••• – – – •••" three quick raps on
the telegraph followed by three holds and back to three quick raps. This “O”
being the show title (not so curiously being the object, formally or
metaphorically, in three different shows in the LES at present) carries with it
serious art historical situations. The primary being that of Vasari’s story of
Giotto’s “O”, the first significant instance, or anecdote, where an artist
determined his skill not by the better or more beautiful design, but simply
by demonstration of his hand in drawing a perfect, red circle.
The circle was a
humorous enough remark, but it won Giotto the Duke’s favor, and it set forth
the serious understanding that above all, drawing, or disegno, should be pursued by artists in its paragon with colore, considered a superficial obfuscation of bad draftsmanship.
It is here, at
Tomorrow that an up-to-date convergence of the two arts has been best worked by
Max Brand into his mural, which covers the entire architecture of the gallery. To memory, in each show since its beginning,
artists have worked together the architectonics of the gallery with specific
works, in situ as it were, but it is
with Brand’s mural, appropriate in boundless Spring joy, that the most
straightforward, gratifying gesture has been made. The forms and entanglement of lines, brought
together simply by accumulations and contours of bright color, are as if
Kirchner and Bill Traylor had supposed a mural together while attending
Städelschule. There is a smartness to it, a sarcastic whim thrown to the idea
of “artist-as-child,” but this fruitless discussion of description are nothing
if the totality of work does not aid, or aim, in bringing about something.
What is most
important about Brand’s drawings, the physical objects included in the show,
are what they, with Rappeneau’s drawings, say to the present-tense being of the
drawn line. This present tense formation
in drawing, the elements and techniques of the drawn line that bring about a
total composition, is described as the forma
formans, or the form being presently self-generative rather than having
been generated, forma formata.
Attention is called to the present, as the drawings here are both founded in
historical techniques, but generate line within and without the paper support,
creating a present momentum within the line that is neither wholly due to the
wall mural or wholly due to the drawings themselves. It is a form in the process of continually forming itself, anew, and actively calling attention to the techniques of drawing that it depends upon for its survival, its living in the present.
However, it is
more true that the elegant lines of Rappeneau, deeply attached to the figura serpentinata and elevation of
form by convex space so indebted to Mannerist sensibilities, that benefit more
so by Brand’s wall drawings than do the artist’s own A4-sized works on paper.
Where color is expansive in the mural, it negates, even muddles, the intensely
detailed works that Brand has attempted to test the rhetoric of drawing and
painting--scrawls, scratches, malfunctioning color that arises appropriately in
some homeless representation, all becoming so lost in its present tension with
the mural.
This tension is lost, or eased, in Rappeneau’s works due to the fluidity of form—line extending into paper and exiting smoothly out—that make distinguished his bodies. One is reminded of Ruskin’s praise to the glacial sweeps near Chamonix in the French Alps as the most beautiful abstract lines he had ever seen in nature, noting its slow, emotional drive through the terrain increasingly forming both itself anew as it did the land. Ruskin was writing on architecture, specifically that of Venice, and the lines employed by architects from nature, but as these are intensely mannered bodies—elongated, serpentine forms filling a convex space that leaves “no untidy corners”—an architecture is formed that seems coolly natural. In Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the artist’s hand floats toward the viewer, made larger by the mirror (convex mirrors were more affordable in the Renaissance than flat mirrors due to the mode of manufacturing in the silvering process), as if it is separated from his body. It is an unnatural deference, which many have associated with the ego of the distinguished, highlighted form, but in Rappeneau’s work there is no seeming unnatural, uncouth behavior to form. There is a part-to-part, symbiotic relationship between the bodies and their space, and what connects them in such beautiful harmony, is, like Ruskin’s glacier and Giotto’s “O”, the adherence to natural, untarnished line which continually gives no matter the present.
This tension is lost, or eased, in Rappeneau’s works due to the fluidity of form—line extending into paper and exiting smoothly out—that make distinguished his bodies. One is reminded of Ruskin’s praise to the glacial sweeps near Chamonix in the French Alps as the most beautiful abstract lines he had ever seen in nature, noting its slow, emotional drive through the terrain increasingly forming both itself anew as it did the land. Ruskin was writing on architecture, specifically that of Venice, and the lines employed by architects from nature, but as these are intensely mannered bodies—elongated, serpentine forms filling a convex space that leaves “no untidy corners”—an architecture is formed that seems coolly natural. In Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the artist’s hand floats toward the viewer, made larger by the mirror (convex mirrors were more affordable in the Renaissance than flat mirrors due to the mode of manufacturing in the silvering process), as if it is separated from his body. It is an unnatural deference, which many have associated with the ego of the distinguished, highlighted form, but in Rappeneau’s work there is no seeming unnatural, uncouth behavior to form. There is a part-to-part, symbiotic relationship between the bodies and their space, and what connects them in such beautiful harmony, is, like Ruskin’s glacier and Giotto’s “O”, the adherence to natural, untarnished line which continually gives no matter the present.
