I have followed Susan Rothenberg since I saw her famous paintings of horses years ago. The animals seem imbued with distinctive spiritual energy, bursting, filling, almost departing the canvas surfaces that contain them.
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| Bubbles Yellow |
Her ability to paint abstractly while retaining some figuration has always seemed masterful and confident. Impasto techniques give an opaque yet rich depth to the canvas. The beings are sentient, the forms having a strange awkwardness. I was struck by the same asymmetric character in the portraits of Alice Neel. The dog's limbs, joints, and contours connect stiffly to the body core. Yellow Bubble's eyes ask the eternal question: "When are we going for a walk?"
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| Dog with Green Head |
This dog's gaze is watchful, watchful, almost calculating whether to even request one.
The green head is among the features of the work that make me smile. Matisse painted his wife with a green stripe down her face, shocking French art critics. (They did set themselves up for that, n'est pas?)
The 3 bird paintings recall to me Morris Graves. His paintings of birds, made after World War II, haunt me.
With their gaunt,aloof presence, they are affected with an isolation and desolation of soul, like looking at photos of emaciated Holocaust survivors. The painted birds seem to have transparent permeable bodies, despite the surface opacity of their materials.
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| Red Bird |
Rothenberg's birds are not bereft creatures, though.
Red Bird broods, back turned towards us, hunched shoulders cradle its bowed head, the dance is finished, and the bird accepts quiet applause.
Look at the colors! The possibilities when using impasto,loose brushstrokes are as compelling as any Old Master secret glaze recipe. These late paintings are so freed in their use of color, sure in the harmonies.
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| Pink Raven |
The figure/ground relationships mostly remain delineated. Rothenberg seems to have gracefully passed through the needle of "push-pull"
abstract spatial dynamic theory. Her compositions are pared and simple, but depend on a positive-negative spatial component. Even so, edges are roughened, overlaid, and blurred, sometimes to the point of partially obscuring the forms, as in 3 Monkeys.
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| 3 Monkeys |
The monkeys seem set in plaster, like fossil displays, or emerging from a thick scrim of snow and obfuscation. It's one easy stride to metaphor; the gunk of fundamentalist explanations. I cannot help but think of the 3 wise monkeys admonishing us about conducting ourselves surrounded by evil.
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Indigo
The darkness is waiting, more beautiful, seductive, and dangerous than any Disney or del Toro maleficent creature. This dark bird has power, while Graves' creatures are bereft of all but poignant waning sentience.
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| The Caribbean |
Rothenberg does not neglect blues. I have been to the tropics many times, and of all the beauty in the world, surpassing even the sunset, tropic blues "zen" me without any koan-type struggles. If this is the void, subjectivity, I'll float awhile, drown if need be, just to stay in the moment of yielding, the joy of entering warm ocean waters of incomparable splendor.
But Rothenberg's two swimmers, perhaps illuminated by the resort's spotlights, seem to be lifted by a rising wave, its crest dark behind them. They are languid, suspended, given over. Will they be caught as it breaks, or slide easily down the back?
And for all the narrative material, the paintings are more important stylistically. I think Susan Rothenberg has unified form and content, and that is an accomplishment
finally depending on formal painterly means, making for art, not illustration.
I have followed Susan Rothenberg since I saw her famous paintings of horses years ago. The animals seem imbued with distinctive spiritual energy, bursting, filling, almost departing the canvas surfaces that contain them.
