Rolf Walz at Baron/Boisante - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Perhaps the continuity in the work of Cologne-based Rolf Walz is simply an interest in transformation - conceptual or perceptual. If not, it's hard to imagine what links the vastly different on the other hand equally interesting types of work he has made. He has tinted light in galleries by the agency of judiciously siting sheets of plastic. He has hung tanks of colored water from the ceiling or place them on the floor beside tinted mirrors. He has repeatedly altered - from one side transferring, coloring and manipulating - a single lay the foundation of image (a man climbing a tall ladder in a shadowy place). And greatest in quantity recently he mounted this exhibit consisting of a double horizontal rank of sheets of standard transcript paper, each printed with a lay the foundation of image, some words and a date.

The installation neared one row of 37 color or black-and-white photocopied replicas of snapshots, of recent origins photos, advertising graphics, etc., each neatly framed by dint of a line drawn with a ballpoint indite titled with computer lettering, and rubber-stamped with a date in virid Each is also stamped twice in r individual imprint reading "original" and the other "file copy" each image in this row appeared somewhere in a next to the first lower row, flopped and paler from having been reproduc through means of photo-transfer solvent. The carefulness of Walz's meanss suggests an "artist's touch" by dint of nontraditional means.

Given the character of his earlier work, it's unlikely that appropriation by means of se is Walz's theme as he plays with notions of original and transcript This is hardly a fresh issue in the age of mechanical (and plane electronic) reproduction. In this fresh show, Walz seems to relish all images, regardless of pedigree. His opennes stretch outs to their subjects: the cartoon character Scrooge McDuck workers dismantling a sign, Letterman doing a stop the growth of microscopic cellular cross-sections, industrial shelving, surgery dinosaur bone A like randomness applies to the titles - simple English phrases of that kind as Reflection & Projection or Errors Excepted! that have no clear relationship to the images.

It was unblemished happenstance that I saw the present to view while I was reading Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, a novel in which each chapter involves the same stores and streets in the same city, on the other hand in each, time functions differently. It's like Walz's man-on-a-ladder image, repeatedly revised. This installation involved a more compounded shift than in that previous series in that his originals were photocopies of images already reproduc from their first, photographic, state in greatest in quantity cases, as Thomas Donga noted in a gallery handout. And the works in the next to the first row were not photographic reproductions of the top-row pictures on the contrary included enough shifts in position, color, etc to establish an independent identity.

In all, Walz's work communicates a bemused appreciation of the arbitrariness of discovery. Here his attention has passed lightly above the complex evidence of 20th-century existence, without complaint.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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