Rodney Carswell at the Renaissance Society - installation art - Chicago, Illinois - Review Of Exhibitions

This mid-career retrospective of Chicago artist Rodney Carswell was a curious exercise in connect-the-dots. The installation of 18 works shunn any kind of chronological or developmental logic, and significant gaps in representation made the overall shape of Carswell's cast even more opaque. Still, the exhibit provided a welcome occasion to revisit this important and prolific artist.

Carswell's hybrid constructions have always been anomalies. They are neither paintings nor plastic arts but large-scaled structures consisting of rich, pigmented canvases that have been shaped and attached to expos made of wood armatures that hang from the wall. Each configuration is built from a put of simple geometric shapes that are arranged and rearranged in seemingly endles permutations of forms. The artist layers his surfaces with oil paint and wax worked to the point where colors are muddied into monochromatic fields of for the most part reds, grays and blues.

The cros is a recurring theme in these works. Its nearness is neither religious nor iconographic on the other hand compositional; it's used as a kind of grid in which to explore formal and conceptual issues. In Tri-Color Cros Encircled in 3 Gray Panels, 1988 sum of two units rectangles and a square are neatly placed together like pieces from a jigsaw embarrass to create one large square. The lower left-hand quadrant contains a cruciform painted in black, white and r that further subdivides the composition, while a faint circle step quicklys just inside the painted structure's external frame. Here, as in greatest in quantity of the artist's work, the viewer is simultaneously aware of the whole as well as its composing parts and so is caught in a teasing quagmire of addition and subtraction.

While this work makes relation to Suprematism and Constructivism, it also bears a marked relationship to the abstract paintings of Brice Marden and Robert Mangold, as well as to the reductive forms of Minimalist statuary However, Carswell's finely crafted percepts preempt any sense of overwhelming nearness or theatricality by revealing the proces of their design. The viewer is quietly invited to research each work microscopically, to discover crooked shifts in color and painterly nuance, to inspect the carpentry of each construction.

The artist's varied interests are best showed in Open Circle: Encircled and gibbeted 1992, in which the painting/sculpture hybrid is greatest in quantity successfully realized. The hollow center of a circular sky-colored canvas contains a tilted wood-land cross that serves as the two a formal and structural support. Like the spoke of a wheel, its arms guide the viewer's gaze in a circular motion around the object's painted circumference, which reveals another circle slightly not on center from the first. The organic purity of this work is somewhat reminiscent of the painted bands of sculptor Martin Puryear, a contemporary of the artist who was living and working in Chicago during a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Carswell's career.

Carswell came of age in Chicago in the late 1970 at a time when the city's penchant for Surrealist-inspired figuration reigned. His continued exploration of material and form appears self-effacing or at least without of step with current artistic practice, particularly during these politically and socially conscious times. on the other hand it is Carswell's unwavering belief in art as an act of individual scrutiny and contemplation that makes his abstract realitys so personal and engaging.

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