Robert Bechtle at O.K. Harris - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Jason Rosenfeld

Robert Bechtle's first New York show in four years was presented in two parts. The first filled the generously sized front room with six panoramic 3-by-6-foot oils painted since 1997. All depict Bechtle's signature subject: the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives and works. The second section formed a small retrospective of eight similar scenes in watercolor from the past decade. Hung in a small, airless room, these forced the viewer fully into the environments presented, and into a dialogue with the artist's shimmering and atmospheric technique.

At first glance, Bechtle's works seem consistent with the Hopperesque Photo-Realist imagery he began with in the late 1960s. But the recent images, especially the oils, rise to a new level. In addition to a supple and deft painterliness, these pictures reveal the consistently conceptual nature of his art through his pursuit of seriality, resisting facile associations with the Photo-Realist tradition of Richard Estes and others. Is it such a stretch to compare Bechtle's single-minded pursuit of his motifs to the intellectual rigor of Dan Graham's or Gordon Matta-Clark's dialogues with the urban?

In paintings such as Mariposa I, we stand rooted on a street corner and survey a most unremarkable landscape, one populated not with teeming masses but with cars in park, not even idling. For idling would imply eventual motion, and there is little in Bechtle's pictures that is anticipatory. The only changeable forms are the long shadows that creep along the streets and the slashing flicks of pigment that skip across the shaded surfaces, depicting light, reflection, heat or, more radically, a flitting vision in a seemingly static scene.

Pictures like Texas Street Intersection, with a classical composition and quietude, offer not only a fondness for Pontiacs but an everyday poetics of place. However, for Bechtle, the vagaries of modern life as lived are compellingly opposed by the regularized vistas of the edges of the city, where orthogonals reign supreme, light is slung daily across well-worn sidewalks and porches, muscle cars lurk dormant on the periphery, and expansive macadam stretches as far as the eye can see, and beyond.