Broadly Speaking

This cooperative venture, in which six artists were challenged to create paperworks using a large-scale press, has provoked unusually imaginative responses that deepen our understanding of their work and broaden the definition of Drawing.

Within the group, Sara Sosnowy’s two pieces vary the most in scale: one measures 40” x 30” and the other 15” square. Also unusual in this group is the relative invisibility of her paper, although its material construction was essential to the formation of her horizontal pattern. Cotton strings were laid on a base of black cotton paper in soft, close waves; in their interstices, Sosnowy painted rows of perfect small gold circles. In their precision and metallic hardness, the disks lend a sense of tautness to the easy undulations of the strings.

For all their intricacy and delicacy, each overall field has a strong, single tone. A sense of calm order prevails. The golden rounds recall commemorative medals, adding a sense of ceremony to Sosnowy’s gentle, articulate and welcome voice.

An obsessiveness of a different kind animates Elena del Rivero’s program—a deeply feminine, psychological investigation of domestic and work spaces and of a thoroughfare. The series title is taken from a disapproving medieval French phrase, Elle sort beaucoup (She goes out a lot).

The intricacy of del Rivero’s concepts is well matched by the complexity of her processes. It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree of control exercised here. All aspects, including the making of each sheet of abaca paper, the watermarks, and the letterpress printing, seem as finely tuned as it is possible to be. But they are not the whole story. At a certain point, the artist exposed The Studio, The Bed, The Table, and The Street to outside experience, and to chance. For example, The Table, printed with a holiday week’s menus, was used as a tablecloth for those meals. The Bed was slept upon, and its rips later repaired using an artful 12th century method.

It is the intensity and the extent of this artist’s control that make its release so telling. Her courage is vindicated by the finished works. In the end, they argue that the damages that human bodies and spirits suffer do not quell the precise and powerfully subversive human will.

David Jeffrey’s work is intrinsically based in materials and processes; its demands must have been a particular challenge for Dieu Donné, but their mutual achievement has gone far beyond inventive solutions.

His two works look completely different. The more spectacular one is a wide expanse of creamy white paper, of which the central rectangular section was covered with minute iron fillings and then compressed in “The Crusher.” Though concrete and non-referential, this crisp area of rust seems ancient. Its ravishing effect is matched left and right by wings of bare paper. Soft as a rose petal and forced into great undulations, these gentle flares have retained the visual fascination of motion.

In the second drawing, carbon black pigment and charcoal impart a satisfying matte dark grey visual weight. The paper was molded on ridged industrial roofing material and shaped into two large sections that hang, slightly overlapping, on the wall. As convincing as the iron work, this piece is tougher—a more controlled, modular formal relief. Both bring to mind Primo Levi’s, “The Periodic Table,” with its descriptions of various elements’ specific qualities, and their metaphoric powers.

Steven Steinman’s layered papers are composed of flowing, brilliant turquoise filters. This is color you could dance to—rhythms of sheer chromatic sensation. Though the papers in this close series were meticulously worked by hand (in processes including brushing, scraping and misting), each of his variant patterns feels effortless, liberating. The skeins and liquid blurs of clear color offer the pleasant feeling of suspension within a different element. The clarity of Steinman’s achievement is neither simple nor accidental. In these buoyant drawings, the formal and emotional levels ride in perfect unison.

Alice Aycock’s work entrances with its fantastic vocabulary: dashing futuristic configurations in league with urgent primal forces. She wrests zooming, twisting conglomerations of tiny, almost cartoony, forms into convincing (if still happily discombobulated) compositions; and the aplomb with which she resolves all these idiosyncratic elements and energies is masterful. Yet, surprisingly, it is color that distinguishes these two superb drawings, color entrenched in the paper itself: an authoritative red and a deep, dignified purple.

Aycock’s scale can be droll, but it is knowing. Despite the major 40” x 60” proportions of these papers, the drawings feel like adjustments to a smaller scale. Her tight, hard forms in ink, marker and charcoal have structural, directional references: opaque white struts outlined in black, chunky gradated grey arrows, a glowing yellow brick road.

These arrangements are played out with a sure hand, but a sense of strangeness persists, perhaps because the images and the paper stay separate. The shapes toss and turn, they burgeon and plunge; but neither extraordinary field of color releases an illusion of space. Remarkably, it is the calm concreteness behind all the action that makes these drawings seem so new. The papers insist on being here, even as we see the artist’s daring dynamics, right there! Definitely Aycock, plus a new twist.

Mel Bochner’s work, too, both confirms a mature artist’s distinctive vision and sharpens our attention with something new. The surface of white paper bonded over black is as cool as old, worn stone or mist. Translucently, above the center, the phrase LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT appears several times, overlaid.

This work is a very rare uniting of the meaning of words and their material, physical presence in the world. They emerge simultaneously toward your consciousness and your eye. If you have ever played catch in the fog on a beach, you may remember how the ball amazingly becomes sensible as it comes toward you into visibility through the misty air.

This is not merely a case of a visual treatment, a degree of translucency, serving as a demonstration of the words, “not transparent.” This is something much more deeply connected to the way the operations of the mind and eye take in and derive intellectual and aesthetic substance from a thing—a physical stimulus—made, after all, of old rags. There are echoes of the transcendence and even the elegiac tone of Yeats’s “rag and bone shop,” in this drawing’s low-voiced yet urgent inscription. These words might have been carved in stone, but Bochner has found something better to do with them.

Citation:
Spector, Naomi. “Broadly Speaking.” Drawn to Scale. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 1999. © 1999 Naomi Spector