Posted on
2013-11-03
In tandem with his pattern paintings, Wool developed a body of work that similarly subverted a set of existing forms, this time using language as his appropriated subject matter. Rendering a word or phrase in bold, blocky stencils arrayed across a geometric grid, he preserved the specific form and order of the language, but freely stripped out punctuation, disrupted conventional spacing, and removed letters. The resulting compositions oscillate between verbal communication and pure formalism, with their structural dissonance reflecting the state of anxiety and agitation conjured by the texts themselves.
The silkscreen has been a primary tool for Wool since the 1990s. In his earliest screenprinted paintings, he expanded on the vocabulary of the pattern works, enlarging their stylized floral motifs for use as near-abstract units of composition. In this period, Wool frequently sabotaged his existing forms as a way to covertly generate new ones, layering the flower icons in dense, overlapping configurations that congeal into a single black mass or become obscured with passages of brusque overpainting. He also introduced a new, entirely freehand gesture in the form of a looping line applied with a spray gun—an irreverent interruption of the imagery below that evokes an act of vandalism on a city street.
Over the past decade, Wool’s simultaneous embrace and repression of painting’s expressive potential have culminated in an open-ended vein of works that he refers to as his “gray paintings.” In these large-scale abstractions, Wool alternates between the act of erasing and the act of drawing, repeatedly wiping away sprayed black enamel paint to create layers of tangled lines and hazy washes. The artist describes the cycle of composition and loss inherent to this process as an attempt to harness the condition of doubt into a generative creative force. The same challenge to the authority of the unique, original gesture is extended in Wool’s most recent silkscreened canvases, which use digital processing to warp the scale, color, and resolution of his painted marks, often merging them with details from other paintings.
Exhibition runs through to January 22nd, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
New York
NY
10128
United States
www.guggenheim.org
