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Edward F. Fry
La vie actuelle, plus fragmentée, plus rapide que les époques précédentes, devait
subir comme moyen d'expression un art de divisionnisme dynamique; et le côté sen-
timental, l'expression populaire, est arrivée à un moment critique ...
- Fernand Léger, 1913
You are hurrying down a street, thinking perhaps of the words from a song, or a sunny afternoon at the sea shore. You cross an intersection as the light is turning from green to red, and ahead you half-notice a shop with food in the window, advertisements for a coming film. A very shiny new car turns the corner, almost hitting you, and suddenly looking up you see first only a black tire beside your foot, then a chromium bumper, the polished fender, a pair of hands on the steering wheel, the driver's sunglasses. Sudden thoughts of death - a bird at the side of the highway, red, an apple, and the lips of a pretty girl walking by.
Such is the new human reality, the psychic landscape of which we are often only halfaware, in our modern, and therefore inevitably urban, world. It is the stuff of certain kinds of cinema (montage, abrupt sequences) and even sometimes of literature, as in Robbe-Grillet's objectified version of it, or as in the poetry of Cendrars. But only painting can both objectify this reality and present to us simultaneously all its complexities. Such is frequently James Rosenquist's approach to painting, by means of which he creates formal works of art.
James Rosenquist's art is not literary, but like great literature it may be experienced at multiple levels of meaning and of formal structure. His painting is often as much concerned with the nature of art as it is with the nature of reality. White Bread for example is first of all a strict composition of closely related colours in planes which indicate space without making use of spatial illusions. The white bread, made with artificial preservatives, is spread with margarine - artificial butter: an objective reflection of industrialized cuisine. The image is painted with a flat anonymous technique, and we suddenly realize that at another level of meaning it is an ironic symbol directed against the heavy impastoes of abstract expressionism.
Rosenquist is not a surrealist. His art is highly self-conscious and intellectually controlled. But when he wishes to do so he can create images that are powerfully hallucinatory, as in Front Lawn. This enveloping evocation of suburban landscape is an archetype of a thousand front lawns in any middle-class community, where side by side they run into each other indistinguishably in an endless repetition. Rosenquist's image implies its own repetition. It radiates that hypnotic ennui which has become a pervasive emotion of modern life. The grass and shrubs are painted in colours that stop just short of being metallic. He is asking us the question, how real is nature under such repeated, standardized conditions?
Let us examine at greater length one of Rosenquist's most important paintings. In Taxi he has created a powerful psychic collage of almost flawless structure. This complex work can be absorbed visually in a single rapid sweep of the eye across its expanse, even as we comprehend rather more slowly its diverse imagery - a racing driver at speed in a cloud of white smoke, a hand touching the ground, a tomato freshly sliced, the roof of a house, bare tree branches against a blue sky with white clouds, peanuts pouring from a striped cellophane bag, candles on a birthday cake. Gradually these images begin to interact with each other, and then to metamorphose. The mechanical speed of the racing car is momentarily stopped by an illusionistic image, charged with associations, incised with precise sharpness into the amorphous white smoke. It is a hand touching blades of grass. But this hand and the grass, both natural objects whose local colour we know instinctively, have lost all natural reality and are painted in a grey tinted faintly yellow. Beside this image of unnatural nature is the racer's wheel, blurred into grey with also a yellow tint: Nature and Machinery, the one ironically neither more nor less natural than the other. We move with a jump in scale to the left side of the picture, from the wheel to its formal counterpart in the huge disk of a tomato, which may or may not be artificially ripened but whose redness is more intense than that of the racing car itself, just as the clouds are perhaps less real in appearance than the white smoke of the racing engine. The peanuts that pour from a bag are at times lime-like abstractions blending with the candle flames, whose presence evokes the memory of countless anonymous celebrations marking the passage of time. But these very peanuts, which are small in relation to the tomato, become possibly huge footballs when beside the racing car, and finally once even a perfectly abstract form that is more intensely blue than the sky itself.
Thus in a world of simple anonymous objects and actions nothing is always itself but is always changing in relation to everything else. The only fixed point of reference is our subjective capacity to comprehend simultaneously all the complexities of such a continually changing and totally relativistic world; and ultimately through this capacity we participate as well in the aesthetic reordering of such a world on a flat surface.
In these few examples of Rosenquist's work, as in others, there are always two or more levels of artistic thought functioning concurrently. It is this richness and subtlety of structure, of formal invention, of transformation and poetic allusion, that places Rosenquist at the most advanced position in contemporary painting. In him is fulfilled Léger's prophetic call for a painter of modern life.
(Based on conversations with the artist in his studio, New York, 2 May 1964.)
Exhibition catalogue, James Rosenquist, Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Paris, June 1964
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