JAMES ROSENQUIST: GIFT WRAPPED DOLLS
Gift Wrapped Doll #16 shows a moonlike face with the plastic arranged in mostly vertical folds and reflecting mostly red and yellow, but with a wider range of colors at the edges. The doll’s right eye is round and wide open; presumably the left is too, but it’s partly obscured by the dense red light reflected off the plastic. Her hair is apparently blond, but the plastic over her hair often reflects yellow or brown, making it hard to distinguish the reflected light from the doll’s hair. The folds in the plastic are rendered with a strong illusion of depth: one has the double sense of looking at a three-dimensional surface and of peering behind it at the doll.
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Part of this work’s beauty is the way these fragments intrude on the composition. Except for some that appear behind the bird’s tail, these slivers are painted as if they were in front of the picture. Rosenquist’s precise division of the canvas into “algae,” “stars,” and “faces” and the way each sliver apparently sits at a precisely defined depth–some of the bands appear to pass under or behind others–create the sense of an aesthetic organization very different from anything in nature.
