Artschwager pinxit: though inspired by photographs and rendered on commercial construction board, Richard Artschwager's paintings reflect an acute awareness of art history. A survey honoring the artist on his 80th birthday sampled the conceptual and technical variety of four decades' work

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Roni Feinstein

For over 40 years, Richard Artschwager has been executing paintings on Celotex, a rigid compound board formed from pressed fibers and generally used in construction. Although it has a smooth side, Artschwager has consistently chosen the textured reverse, exploiting the rough surface as an active participant that is essential to the work's imagery, expression and meaning. While a thin coat of black acrylic paint is used to articulate the support's bumps and crags, the paintings convey some of the graphic presence of large-scale black-and-white drawings. Most are based on photographs, generally newspaper images enlarged to the size of easel paintings. The magnification of the photographs, combined with the highly textured surfaces, cause the images to appear grainy and blurred, a hallmark of his style.

A retrospective devoted to Artschwager's painting, which commemorated the artist's 80th birthday, was recently organized by Bonnie Clearwater for the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Titled "Richard Artschwager: 'Painting' Then and Now," it was a small, highly selective exhibition of 29 works on Celotex produced between 1962 and 2003. Among them were still lifes, portraits, figural groups, landscapes, interiors and architectural views, as well as a few allegorical paintings inspired by the events of 9/11. The technical variations found in the works on Celotex were also ably represented: for example, the artist's incorporation of Formica panels and inserts beginning in the 1960s; his selective use of painted color and move to pattern-embossed Celotex in the '70s; and his turn to handcrafted textured materials adhered to Celotex after the board ceased being manufactured with textures in the mid-'90s.

The range of subjects and techniques seen in the show, together with the freshness and sense of immediacy embedded in the works themselves--owing to the artist's formal manipulations and mode of address--caused each painting to stand as a kind of revelation, a world unto itself with its own ideas, challenges and concerns. As a whole, the retrospective demonstrated that for Artschwager, painting on Celotex has proved a medium rich with possibilities, sufficient to nourish and sustain him over the course of four decades, as well as one ideally suited to his sensibility and intentions.

One of Artschwager's intentions has been to pose open-ended questions about the nature of perception and representation. All of the technical and formal means at his disposal--among them repetitions and reversals of form, spatial illusion and perspective (often deliberately askew) and specially conceived reflective or hand-painted frames--are employed to provoke the viewer not only to look, but to become self-conscious and aware in the process of looking. To this end, Artschwager mounts a direct form of address, offering close-ups and other points of view that put the spectator in the very center of the picture. The primary device in this regard, however, is grain and blur, which strain the eyes with the effort to focus the image and determine what is being seen.

Artschwager once defined art as "thought experiencing itself," (1) and it seems no accident that through the years, his paintings have remained predominantly gray, the color of brain matter and cerebration. The indistinct nature of his tonal renderings also operates on a cognitive level. It is used by the artist as a metaphor for loss, inaccessibility and, ultimately and somewhat ironically (given the emphasis on thought), the limited nature of human understanding, the impossibility of gaining a full grasp on reality. In the exhibition catalogue, Clearwater maintains that Artschwager, who is generally considered the epitome of the cool, dispassionate artist (a long-standing evaluation based largely on his Formica, furniture-based sculptures), empathizes with the subjects of his paintings, which often contain personal narratives. While feelings for the subjects may be in evidence, the haziness of the images tends to function as a mask, a means by which to maintain distance and infuse the grisaille paintings with ambiguity.

Woman with a Ball (1962), the artist's earliest existing photo-based painting and the opening image of the show, presents a young woman in a bathing suit and cap, lying on her back, with her arms and shapely legs in the air, playfully and suggestively grasping a beach ball. While it might at first appear to be a quintessentially Pop image, recalling, among other things, Lichtenstein's famous painting of the same title based on an advertisement and Wesselmann's similarly open-mouthed, manicured nudes, Artschwager's painting is intimate and nostalgia-laden, having the look and feel of an old hand-colored family photograph. The sense of intimacy is enhanced by the close-up view and the manner in which the image is cropped tightly around the rectangle formed by the girl's back and upraised limbs, a shape reasserted by the stepped metal frame. In a perfect marriage of subject and technique, the textured Celotex evokes the graininess and faded quality of the snapshot as well as effects of light, sand and water, the dissolution of the woman's body near the bottom edge of the picture presumably being the result of glare. The artist said of a previous painting based on a found snapshot of anonymous bathers that the figures were "not very glamorous looking. They would live their lives and they would be dead someday. I thought it would be good to paint them as they were, without satire." (2)