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James Rosenquist
Gene R. Swenson
James Rosenquist [Green; to Feb. 17] forces the viewer to recognize the discordant and anonymous elements of an environment which faces him daily. Although Rosenquist's pictures are large, only a part of the image of a shirt cuff or a chin may occupy as much as half of the picture. The viewer's experience is less a sense of disproportion or even overenlargement (the quality of painting is that of a sign painter) than a sense of violence at seeing fragments of a billboard environment in actual, full-size proportions; we are not permitted distance with its numbing illusion of escape. Shadows is divided into three sections: on the inner edge of the dark left section is a faucet with a stream of water flowing out of it; the central part is painted a luminescent red with the glowing profile of a smiling girl and her shadow parallel to the slanting right side of the section; to its right, like a psychological X-ray, the partial curve of a giant, darkened whitewall tire seems to reverberate. As a painting about an annoying sound, a placid but frantically glowing exterior and the mind turning over, it is obvious and even corny. But in pushing the painting to the limits of scale, Rosenquist has pushed to our limits of thought: he forces us to face the mechanical but real size of the world and makes us realize how easily we can become shadows. The elements of this impersonal Brobdingnagian world are pieced together with a ruthless clarity; it is profoundly disturbing and negative.
Art News, February 1962: 20
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