克里斯托弗‧塢爾

Luhring Augustine, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2004

Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne 2008, no. 52, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1988, Untitled (P74) is an imposing example of Christopher Wool’s early series of ‘rubber stamp paintings’ initiated during the very same year. Following on from the earliest corpus of ‘roller paintings’, the series of works created with off-the-shelf rollers used to apply decorative patterns directly onto the wall in simulation of wallpaper, the rubber-stamps continued Wool’s inquiry into and deconstruction of the conventions of painting. Heavily influenced by the ‘allover’ compositional strategy of Jackson Pollock; minimal palette, line and gesture of Brice Marden; and mediated by Andy Warhol’s integration of mechanical methods, Wool’s almost exclusively black and white painterly enquiry is evocatively multifaceted yet reductive of tradition. As elucidated by Ann Goldstein: “From the beginning, Wool sought to make traditional paintings that did not look like traditional paintings… he eliminated everything that seemed unnecessary, rejecting colour, hierarchical composition, and internal form” (Ann Goldstein, ‘How to Paint’ in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne 2008, p. 185). The unity of painting and process is thus telescoped in the present work, in which the remit of expression resides in the layering, register, overprinting and variance of the rubber stamp. Depicting a roving vine-like pattern repeated in faintly delineated squares of stamped application, Untitled (P74) is defined by the schema of painterly omissions or ‘glitches’ that disrupt the decorative pattern. The effect is one in which Wool invokes the associative potential of decorative imagery for his scrutiny of contemporary painting; as presciently observed by Gary Indiana for the Village Voice one year before the creation of Untitled (P74): “Their decorative qualities are deceptions. They eye doesn’t linger in one place or rove over them registering choice bits, but locks into contact with the surface and freezes into a numbed stare. They exercise an almost hideous power, like real mirrors of existence” (Gary Indiana, The Village Voice, March 1987, cited in: Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Op. cit., p. 48).

Comprising a minimal condensation of a highly commercialised style of decorative pattern - a coda of contemporaneous mass taste - Untitled (P74) melds an ironic, appropriationist detachment with the language and strategies of abstraction. At a time when the prevailing trend was set by neo-expressionism and Transavantguardia, Wool, alongside a small enclave of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, scrutinised the role of painting from within the medium itself. These artists explored new possibilities by embracing failure and parodying archetypes of painterly expression. Condensed to the nominal register of black and white Alkyd applied to an aluminium ground, the slick flatness of surface, the erasure of verisimilitude and privilege of semiotic distillation renders a myriad of art historical precedent with sensational economy. Indeed, densely evocative and intensely discursive with art history, Wool's Untitled (P74) commandingly explores and reconsiders the act and process of painting via wealth of arcane allusion.

As previously cited, these early patterned works are immediately evocative of the Abstract Expressionist paradigm of Jackson Pollock, while the stark binary of black and white immediately calls to mind the strict chromatic polarity of Franz Kline. Meanwhile Wool’s approach to media, recapitulation of found imagery and pictorial repetition forges a strong parity with Pop masterworks by the likes of Jasper Johns and Warhol. Nonetheless, taking on a level of detachment further removed from the dispassionate repetition in the Death and Disaster series, Wool is cooler, more reticent even, than Warhol. John Caldwell explains: “Since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting” (John Caldwell cited in: Ann Goldstein, Ibid., p. 185). As perfectly represented by the present work, Wool addresses these concerns via a heavily reductive erasure of both abstraction and figuration from which he may then return and intervene: “You take colour out, you take gesture out – and then later you can put them in. But it’s easier to define things by what they’re not than by what they are” (the artist cited in: Ibid.).

Through cumulative acts of reductionism and recapitulation, Wool has stripped down the essential facets of painting to engender a union of process with picture making. In a progression started with the roller and rubber-stamp paintings, through to the stencilled text pictures and the most recent corpus of silkscreened gestural abstractions, Wool has explored a mutating, visually arresting landscape of seemingly mechanical, cipher-like reductions; coolly detached and emptied of heroic angst. Epitomizing Wool’s visual restraint, the present work embodies Marga Paz's deft summary that "We are confronted with work that deals with the possibilities and mechanisms that keep painting alive and valid in the present, an issue that, despite all forecasts, is one of the most productive and complex issues in contemporary visual art" (Marga Paz in: Exhibition Catalogue, Valencià, IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Christopher Wool, 2006, p. 200).