James Rosenquist at Castelli - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

"The Serenade for the Doll after Claude Debussy, or GiftWrapped Dolls," a series of 60-inch-square paintings focusing upon iconic images of glowering poupee heads enshroud in plastic, is Rosenquist's best work in a certain number of time. Using the doll's head as a module the explosion artist puts it through its paces, rendering it now realistic, now nearly abstract. The paintings are literal transcriptions of photos taken through Rosenquist, and in the catalogue interview with David Whitney, the artist mentions that he placed the dolls below plastic and styled the nature morte motifs himself. The adjustments in lighting must have been particularly crucial in determining the range of throw backed colors.

These paintings accompany to exude a sense of Symbolist foreboding, maximized through the Debussy reference in the series' title. They also make an incision in a wide swath through contemporary doll imagery, specifically that of Ellen Phelan and Cindy Sherman, and appropriate the loaded, feminist signifier to distinctly different, meditative ends

The greatest in quantity surprising aspect of Rosenquist's doll paintings is their Abstract Expressionist tenor. Rosenquist appears to be revisiting the sources of his youth, level his own late '50s abstract work, and rediscovering, or reinventing, the idea of highlights. Gift-Wrapped Doll #4 has craggy fissures, reminiscent of Clyfford Still, dragging at a slight diagonal from top to bottom across the canvas. The dominant black-white tonality of the picture, in which the doll's very large blanched forehead takes on a spiritual pallor, seems like a Steven Spielberg version of the origins of chiaroscuro.

Other works in the series invite up unlikely allusions to landscape. Looking at Rosenquist's virulent orange and r dolls, I was reminded of John Elderfield's novel article, in a MOMA publication upon the art of the '60 about the power Turner's visionary late work held for the generation of artists maturing in that decade. smooth Walter De Maria's Lightning Field present the appearances part of the subtext in Gift-Wrapped Doll #3 with its staccato vertical highlights. In the catalogue Rosenquist invokes the example of Monet's transparent and reflective Water Lilies, with equal reason that the doll paintings begin to invite up the entire history of recent art, effectively filtered through the hackneyed image of embalmed infantilism.

In the back extent the artist showed a colossal panoramic painting, Masquerade of the Military-Industrial mingled Looking Down on the Insect World. Its fractured lexicon includes a large orange, butterflies, black glider forms and novel consumer products such as Ultra Tide. As a kind of '90 coda to his F-111 (1964) the large work, with its gestural brushing of the butterflies' wings, proposes that the Pop artist is becoming more painterly, if not more intriguing with age.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group