David Russick: New Works
David Russick’s somewhat cerebral art dwells at the intersection of his sparse, often puzzling imagery, the explanations one imagines for it, and the explanations he himself provides (if one knows them). There’s little of the ecstatic vision of a Vermeer, whose delicate rendition of light creates a sense of completeness; but Russick achieves an intellectual engagement, placing the viewer at the center of a puzzle whose key is not completely contained within the image.
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Russick has worked for some years at Chicago’s Phyllis Kind Gallery, and many of his works contain art references–to his own work and to the art world as a whole. Negative Creep, one of three pieces in the show whose title comes from a Nirvana song, shows a bouquet of flowers with the black outline of a crank superimposed on them. For Russick this is an “accusatory painting” about “artists who make the same mediocre painting over and over again–the handle or crank is a metaphor for cranking it out.” Here I could see Russick’s bitter humor more clearly than I had the morbidity of Stillness, but the artist’s anger is again undercut by the work’s gentle, pale, unassertive colors. And the fact that Russick’s bouquet is painted with some delicacy and skill, and that its muted colors are not those of the usual bad flower painting, seems to contradict his point.
By painting an image of his studio floor, with its random streaks of paint, Russick parodies both painters who choose grand subjects and abstractionists who present their self-created forms as profound revelations. But once again his skill as a painter betrays him a bit. Though his abstract design has none of the inner order and beauty of a Rothko or Pollock, neither is it completely random–as disordered as it should be for All Apologies to be wholly ironic. Russick creates multiple levels of depth: some colors partly obscure others, and some are translucent, revealing other forms behind. There doesn’t seem to be any hidden order, the design doesn’t seem particularly expressive of anything, but even without the viewer knowing its source in the real world, it does have an odd kind of facticity, as if–like the constellation–it were an image of a natural phenomenon. The absurdly cute, overdetermined design of Felix, every curve contributing to his cuteness, is juxtaposed with random patterns taken from the real world–spatters of paint and the stars–and viewers are left to draw their own conclusions.
For Russick image making is problematic. The history of art weighs on his work; he cannot simply make a picture without worrying about its implications. His works are thought-provoking but, except for Dumb/Happy, more puzzles to be solved than images to be enjoyed. They left me with a retrograde longing for some good old-fashioned pictures.
What’s fascinating about these works is the way they blend unity with disjunction. A painting by Juan Lugan gives the land the feeling of a tapestry. Terraced yellow and green fields on the left echo the brush strokes atop a hill on the right, creating a consistent texture that integrates the human figures, all much smaller than the fields, into a single design. But in the center background a field of giant flowers, much taller than the people, adds an almost surreal incongruity. Similar spatial anomalies mark Manuel Cuyo’s La Vida Campesina (“Country Life”). A hill with two animals grazing on its steep slope rises at almost a 45-degree angle, then drops off abruptly. We see Quilotoa mountain in the background, oddly enjambed with a small slope with grazing animals that’s very much in the foreground. Yet a woman leading a pack animal and spinning wool as she walks on a road curving around this slope integrates the hill with village life: humans, plants, animals, and land are all seen as part of the same world. That unity, the mixture of sensuous colors, and the incongruities of perspective–however much they may be based on the landscape–are what make this work intriguing, alive.
