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JAY STROMMEN:
Gallery Park West First came earth and fire, wind and water. In a brief moment afterwards -- at the end of over 4.6 billion years -- a humanity has busied itself with Das Kapital and clones from among its many selves. Mark Twain may have doubted that all creation was for the benefit of an insignificant, visually acute and curiously observant primate, but then, what is a human sense of being if not to create and be observed; and, if standing back to look at just what it is one has done, to go on to understand and grow still more? Jay Strommen's art has centered foremost on fired earth -- ceramic forms -- but pigments, politics, and a free play of hand highlight this show. "Jay Strommen: New Paintings and Ceramic Sculptures," is at Chicago's Gallery Park West until June 18, 2001. The ceramic art of Jay Strommen has been reviewed in www.artscope.net (May, 2000), and while this exhibit includes several sculptural works, among them examples from his "Bottle Rocket" series, the main focus this time is on the artist's paintings and collage. Still, allied themes and aesthetic strategies unite the entire body of Strommen's current work. Strommen's art reveals an abiding concern with durance in the course of time, with the patinas, mental and material, which ideas as well as objects acquire as they age and encounter other heirs. This artist favors tints and colors allied with earth and natural elements: copper greens collaborate with iron reds, marble whites are joined with amber hues, and patterns born of sediment and metamorphic flux build a repertoire for easel and assembled art. And in both, Strommen's mixed media canvases and in his mounted shadow-box collage, the artifacts of human lives appear again as fossils weathered from a midden heap of history. Here, age mixes with a modern idiom. Of the fifty-two works initially on display, the paintings dominate. Often, they are displayed in groupings; a reflection of the artist's working pace -- a spur to act dominoes into numerous alternatives. I Will Listen to My Teacher (2001) serves as example of both the artist's attitude and style. In this piece, the focal element, an ochre document, records that title phrase in a repeated listing that recalls a familiar high school punishment. But all about this rote gesture, a chaos of brushstroke and frenzied contour takes form, and it stubbornly maintains a dynamic, if hidden logic of its own.
A number of Strommen's paintings lie within the Abstract Expressionist currents of such as Robert Motherwell. At times, Jay Strommen's art gravitates to 'Action' or 'Gestural' work as heralded by Jackson Pollock. Such paintings present a frothing, stimulating riot of color contrasts; contours swept in arched, curved trajectories and counterbalancing forms; and often a thick relief, an impasto, of the applied pigments. But the artist's love of sheer tactile handwork -- the physical working of paint as a resisting, colorful paste on a flat surface -- is given discipline by both controlled, deliberate composition (each element implies its own solution as to how it fits the overall image); and often, perhaps foremost, an awareness of some initial content drawn from real event, perceived reaction, or a latent belief. Each painted image, no matter how seemingly visceral, abstract and purely visual, is prompted by experience, by artifact, even if viewed through a conceptualized program. In several works, that 'prompt' is manifest. In I Will Listen to My Teacher (2001), an ordered, if ironical, incantation is set as centerpoint to a surrounding free, spontaneous and yet coherent improvisation of form and color. In a painting such as Grandpa (2000), the overt image is disciplined and referential: an American flag with 50 stars against a red square, and in which red and golden ochre, earthen washes form the traditional stripes. However, one quickly discerns the dollar bills that constitute the underlying layer, and which are boldly repeated in the edging that frames the image as a whole. A first thought is to Jasper Johns and other American artists who have treated that motif. But here, one feels certain that Strommen came to the flag for reasons of his own: in these paintings, this artist draws from widely recognized symbol to ease his own, specific views toward a common currency. That recurring and widely recognized motifs shape the artist's fundamental sense of sight is most evident in his banknote images. Three dollars on White splices the title's stated raw material into a single, mosaicized and non-negotiable idolatry, payable only to the avaricious soul of man. In this art, there is as much a question mark, as there is a touch of insistent irony -- nothing but the artist's painted background is black and white. In such dissected and reconstituted collage, Strommen offers Four Dollars on Black, and, in a double turn, Eight Dollars on White. In dissembling, and in disassembly, the artist asks close scrutiny to the nature of legal tender. Jay Strommen has himself noted that the nature of paper currency still puzzles him. In fact, a banknote is a sign of faith... Naive barter, without a middleman, no longer tallies what is demanded and what, in answer, is produced. Today, governments, or federally-endorsed private banks, vouchsafe a common denominator of exchange. That even such power is not infallible is signaled in Strommen's Currency Collapse, a 'disassemblage' of sliced one-dollar bills within a white color field. Strommen, in his forms of expression, often seems to meditate on Pollock, Motherwell or Jasper Johns, or even Louise Nevelson and Marcel Duchamp. But here, this artist, in his more articulate concerns, contemplates both currency and Capital. In concrete terms, these themes flesh out most modern everyday desires. And the artist is aware that immediate desire -- impulse consumption -- is met by the monies, the strategic Capital of a market, competitive and yet often as unsavvy as the artist. For Strommen, that is a fascination and a fear.
Life Tastes Good blends a truncated "Coca" [Cola(TM)] logo and six $1.00 bills. A simplest pleasure rests upon a multi-million dollar industry. Throughout this art, a tension holds between the oft encountered artifact -- the each and every day -- and the greater trends and powers that emerge and orchestrate this course of life. And the artist's own specific encounters and experience are as well those shared with contemporaries, his fellow citizens. One discerns a subtle graphic equation between the red and white logo-form of stars in Grandpa and the soft drink label -- white messages within an eye-catching red. Willy & Picasso, Not War builds on that visual vocabulary. A flag is painted, with less detail, without stars to fix its date. Below an embedded caption, "World War," a Picasso linocut and a photo of singer, Willy Nelson, provide a note of dissonance and dissent: individuals counter a world phenomenon, which, by its very lack of specific numbering, underscores the recurrent nature. In all these paintings, the dollar bill is a persistent obligato. Still, the artist notes that, at times, the overwhelming fact of ciphers itself holds a fascinating power. 3.1428571 (2001) stands as testament. In this painting, bold, frenetic strokes counterpoint with a light and wiry embellishment. A central, eruptive and freely worked impulse is eaten away at by a lighter, 'busy' follow-up. Robert Rauschenberg said: "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)" That belief was reflected in Rauschenberg's combination of material objects within the painted plane: his Bed of 1955 is a prime example. Soon, Rauschenberg, in his Coca Cola Plan (1958), brought such fully three-dimensional artifacts still more prominently into 'easel' painting. In Strommen's current work, the artist's technique and expression advance a dialogue with predecessors such as Pollock, Motherwell, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Nevelson, Duchamp -- just as Cezanne provoked Braque and Picasso into later art developments. Even in the most adventurous of art, there are continuities and legacies. Jay Strommen, as a painter, ceramicist, and a sculptor, might be expected to jump genres. In this present exhibition, Strommen includes several three-dimensional works which complement his more familiar ceramic work. The "Stone Temple Pilot Series" are mixed media pieces. The artist has cast identical clones of a young child's head, and mounted them on bases of fired clay or wood. One particular example (No. 44 in the gallery listing) presents seven identical cast heads, mounted in a miter box and surrounded by miniature railings. In this piece, six of the clones join as rank in file, while a seventh turns its back on them. The pieces in "Stone Temple Pilot Series" often mime elemental social groups: cloned units that serve as models for the stances and body language individuals assume by nature when among fellows. These variations came about as the artist's response to modern genetic adventures: the assaults on DNA, the eagerness in seeking human cloning... the uneasy consequences for human individuality. Strommen's works in the "Stone Temple Pilot Series," and his assemblage pieces in shadow boxes, do require initial thematic reference or subject clues to narrow their otherwise open associations toward the artist's own studied intents. Without such a programmatic guide, the artist's core inspirations -- be they evocations of currency as abstract token, his doubts about 'genetic progress,' or more specific motifs of the human affectivity which attaches to material artifact -- are not always self-evident. In many of the paintings, a sheer exuberance of form and color, independent of any external reference, is enough to provoke the visitor's involvement and gratification. Fortune does favor the prepared. Five artworks at Gallery Park West present an additional genre currently being explored by this artist. Jay Strommen gathers materials with expressive potential: the jettison of other lives, salvaged items of interest: appropriated images, articles of clothing such as gloves, sections of wood and metal wires. In combining these, he further elaborates the whole with painted areas. In time, some gathered raw elements spark a sustained impulse toward a specific series of work. Such series and groupings, focused about a particular motif, often arise from what is at hand which works in tandem with recent observations that stir the artist into aesthetic response -- materials are the midwife to expression. The five assemblage pieces at Gallery Park West are each mounted under glass in deep box-frames. Whether Strommen's Horseback to New York & 2 Dollars, Red Glove, or his Potter 4 President, a critical anecdote lurks just beyond explicit words. The viewer himself is led into his own analogous experience. A series of photographs (11"x14") taken in Yosemite National Park round out this showing. These are executed with a fine art sensibility, well conceived and 'scenic.' This body of work, a pleasure in itself and a seeming homage to masters such as Edward Weston, confirm that Strommen's aesthetic explorations reflect this artist's chosen voice. In pure skill of technique, Strommen could repeat past art. Instead, he choses to explore the fine perceptive balance which in fact distinguishes the present from the past. Pigments, politics, and a free play of hand are purely human activities. In ceramic work, and now in painting, Jay Strommen melds a sense of ancient essences -- earth and fire, air and water -- into a meditation upon durance and fashion, a core which alters but persists, the faith and doubts we invest in paper, paint, and clay -- a faith which gives them value... art. We observe, examine and progress.... "JAY STROMMEN: New Paintings and Ceramic Sculptures" will be on display at Chicago's Gallery Park West until June 18, 2001. During the course of this exhibition, several pieces will be rotated to afford a broader presentation of work. Further information upon this artist may be found at http://www.artic.edu/saic/art/projects/students/jstrommen-p1.html and at http://www.trnty.edu/gallery/. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books related to www.artscope.net reviews may be purchased through this site's www.amazon.com link. Robert Rauschenberg's work, as well as that of Jasper Johns's are usefully illustrated in Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism, edited by David Britt (Thames and Hudson:1999). Several color reproductions may be found in Modern Art: Painting/Sculpture/Architecture by Sam Hunter and John Jacobus (Harry N.Abrams:1985). Also of interest are Sam Hunter's Robert Rauschenberg (Rizzoli:1999), and Kirk Varnedoe's Jasper Johns: a Retrospective (MOMA:1996) [the latter distributed by Abrams]. |
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