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HIGHWAYS & BY-WAYS
Nicolas Calas
Before Allan D'Arcangelo there was Chirico to whom we should be everlastingly grateful for having made the landscape look as artificial as an African mask. Reality is not enough! Playing with distance, Chirico evoked a Palladian past. But he was not granted the prescience to foresee that some half-century later his biscuits would acquire a Pop taste. Is Pop Art actually two-dimensional, as has sometimes been claimed? With DArcangelo's highways Pop Art must seriously consider the problem of tri-dimensionality. D'Arcangelo's use of distance neither serves to take us back into a past of which Chirico was fond, nor to isolate us in the present as does Dali. D'Arcangelo's highways are as much in the now as Kafka's labyrinth. Unlike the Futurist's view of speed which is spectatororiented, D'Arcangelo's is driver-oriented. One is aware of having either to speed up or slow down.
The highway is today the significant form of the American architectural landscape. Unlike Chirico, who shifts the position of the vanishing point to create the sense of loss of position between the now and the historical past, D'Arcangelo makes of the vanishing point the polar star of the speeding driver.) When caught in the straits of obsession, how is one to escape from fixations? In his series of paintings called USA, D'Arcangelo approaches the dilemma by transcribing perspective into the vocabulary of diagram: on either side of the highway, trees fall within a triangle; with the parallels of the road, they meet the triangular skyline at a point we call vanishing.
Theoretically, these paintings should be too abstract to arouse emotion. But D'Arcangelo tunes his paintings: the skyline is supported by jetting tree-tops, the road is taunted by road signs which strain toward the hyphenated center line; nevertheless, the distant sky is precipitated into the foreground because of the exaggerated clarity of the farthest road markings and trees. By omitting details which would distract attention from forms, D'Arcangelo takes sides in the struggle between the abstract and its opponents: road signs bear down starkly-, daytime trees flatten into chrome-green areas, after dusk nightgreen, while black roads turn brown from the reflection of greens, turned black. These defy the mirror of color.
D'Arcangelo breaks the hold of perspective by a strict adherence to the driver's code. In a recent series of works called Barriers, he weights his pictures with constructions, whether beams of bridges coated in primer-orange or warning signs striped white and black or white and red, superimposing an irregular H or a zebraic net over the pictorial space. Cadmium orange or stripes brightened with white lift the monochrome sky out of the background.
The painter-driver exploits his dual personality for the benefit of the observer. In some instances the view of the highway vanishing is isolated and boxed in a single flat square of the picture plane. Geometry is no longer the handmaiden of images; images are the raiments of tectonics. Tuned to speed, geometry of the barriers set crosswise over the view divides the picture into "musical" sections. (This optical illusion is actually due to the pull exerted by the vivid oblique red stripes.) D'Arcangelo's shift of emphasis from distance to plane is an escape from the narrowing speed. Relief from significant forms is in forms upset.
D'Arcangelo goes on to upset the order of images. In a recent painting, Map, which takes precedence, the image of the road or the map? The curve of the East Coast or the curve of the highway? The division of the painting into four equal squares or the content of the squares? In the beginning was the printed image. Then came the painting created in the image of its maker.
Another, more recent, series of highways are seen perpendicular. They confront the driver with his phobia: the road before him, climbing steeply over the next hill, suddenly rises and becomes a wall. Motion is paralyzed, feelings turn cold. What but anxiety can be expressed by the highway's white divide tapering toward the narrowest of skies in the bluest of nights? Barnett Newman was the first to have presented our world with a linear view of the ego. The exchange of ideas among artists is pursued in vivid dialogue that fearlessly transcends the great divide between the figurative and the abstract. )X/hat could be less nonabstract than the landscape of speed? Highways are not for pedestrians. Every mile of paved surface, with its lawn embankments, its framing trees, must be swiftly by-passed. Velocity subtracts. Painters reinterpret cutups into the new abstractlike compositions. The unreality of a glossy postcard's view is collaged to the schematic design of the highway, the green of the lawn is reappraised in terms of a vertical rectangle, the texture of grass is represented by a drawing on a ground rectangle; the sky, reduced to a tiny blue square substituting for the postcard's embellished view of dirt. The faint clouds of a heavenly summer day emerge from the Kodachrome blue of the card to roll in thick circles over parts of the unpainted canvas. In yet another work, the black surface of the highway is treated as a cutout and appears to be standing on its side when conjoined to the schematic drawing of an unfinished highway. In the distance the incomplete section of the road runs into a finished one, this time a ready-made ten-cent shiny reproduction of a curved road.
With the mechanization of the landscape, the real and artificial blend and clash their respective colors, lights, and shapes. D'Arcangelo excels in the cross-fertilization of the abstract and the vernacular, the blueprint and the chromatic, the crowded postcard and the spacious canvas. The effects can be stunning.
In a recent series of "roads," D'Arcangelo increased the distance between reality and its abstract rendition by reducing the highway landscape to a broad central green band placed between two narrow bands, a blue one above and the other below forming a geometric black-and-white pattern. At times the sky itself forms a "road" dividing the green plane in two, at others a road sign set against the green makes the work appear particularly "abstract." These paintings are remarkably attractive; they fascinate the viewer much the way the road stretching before him fascinates the driver. It would seem relevant here to distinguish between "attractive abstraction" and "bland abstraction." With the former we are reminded of the Quattrocento true perspective which charms us with its compressed distance between foreground and background, of Chirico's false projects of cubes which heighten the illusion of mystery, of Mondrian's subtraction of the image from a divinely divided space. With D'Arcangelo, the narrow space encasing the driver has been banished from the roadway, the omission compensated by the vastness of green.
Some critics have denied that D'Arcangelo's highroads are genuine Pop Art because they are not two-dimensional. Confound the wise! How much longer are we to be told that more is less? Painting is more than the eye can see.
D'Arcangelo, in paintings of 1967, got off the highway by making a left turn. Yet be remains in the driver's seat: what he sees on his left differs from what lies oil his right. What the viewer sees is an abstract painting supported by a highway vocabulary. In the oversize Landscape, 1967 (38 inches by 42 inches), and in the small American Landscape (9 inches by 19 inches), stripes have been lifted off the ground to rise and curve a path into the sky while a road sign stops a quatrefoil cloud. The landscape has been exploded, its parts swiftly reassembled; precarious compositions are firmly balanced by a vibrant curve, forcing the road's vanishing point to boomerang into a low summit. Arrows pointing skyward guide the driver in the direction of two-dimensionality.
With these paintings D'Arcangelo makes a most lively contribution to Expressionist geometry. This is a style, mannerist and centrifugal, that at present challenges systematic abstraction.
Arts, September 1963: 57
Art and Artists, October 1967: 12-14
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