Nicholas Sistler:
Still Life With Pink Beads gains in impact and meaning as it’s examined, its mystery deepening. On a round yellow table, pink beads sit opposite a skull, while under them is a drawing or print of what looks like a schematic skull. Behind these objects is a tall, solid purple cone. What seems to be a cord snakes across the floor, at one point passing through a little tunnel in an abstract shape, a pinkish half-sphere. At the upper right is a window, whose red frame reveals a twilit scene of gray earth and deep blue sky punctuated by a few blue or red cylinders and balls.
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While this image contains extremes of color, texture, and objects, a range of middle grounds links the apparent opposites, creating an almost subliminal feeling that the parts of the image are in some cryptic communication with one another. Almost never does a shade exactly repeat; and as a result this strange agglomeration of forms could easily have disintegrated into the familiar disorganization of a bad painting. But many of the objects are similar shades, so that two slightly different blues may echo each other. And Sistler sometimes juxtaposes colors: the pink beads reflect light, making each a sensuous mixture of pink and white. The skull is painted in various shades of white and gray. Yet most of the other colors are almost as solid and undifferentiated as a Mondrian color field, while a few in between reveal tiny brush strokes, creating texture. These surfaces help link the opposite extremes of rendering–from realistically modeled to even, solid colors.
Realistic touches in Sistler’s miniatures enhance such magical thinking. The ruler is too small to show individual lines and numbers– the whole picture is 1 ¾ inches by 3 6 inches–but it does contain a delicately painted gray field just uneven enough to suggest such markings. The colored lines representing borders on the map are painted with similar care. And the way the map and the ruler and the desk drawers, with their carefully rendered round handles, seem like natural objects encourages the viewer to believe that the abstract shapes are painted with similar “fidelity.” Focusing on the mostly abstract forms in the foreground, then the objects on the yellow table in the middle ground, and finally on the sunrise in the background, one is drawn into a scene full of mystery–but one also feels that the real sun is rising.
In some of these works, the natural world seems to interact with the abstract shapes. But many of them abjure objects from nature. In Still Life With Shaving Brush a table holds the brush and a jar; behind them is a mirror that reflects these objects, clearer and larger than life, as well as parts of the room that we otherwise couldn’t see: a hanging blue sphere, a brown floor, a green strip running along the wall. To the left a target with concentric colored circles hangs near a picture of a single dark line spiraling inward against a pink ground. As one’s eye travels from the jar of shaving cream, the cylindrical brushes, and the spiral to the target and a strange half rolling pin on the table, all the circular shapes create a continuity between complexly textured, recognizable objects like the brush and utterly abstract forms.
