Apocalypse and Wallpaper
Christopher Wool. Excerpt from the essay by Glenn O'Brien
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Sometimes, if you look at a word long enough, it stops making sense. And then you can start over again with it. We deconstruct the word and the letter and the phrase by contemplating it in skewed order, instinctively going for Scrabble logic and buried communiqués.Wool deconstructs words and de-contextualizes phrases by stacking letters at faux random. The process generates calligraphic effects, acrostic reverb, and a kind of Rubik's cubism of meaning. It's about the meeting point between the machine and hand work, between formula and expression. There are no answers here, only good questions about how characters and words work. Or not.
Unlike the swaggering abstractionists of the fifties, the purist painters,Wool doesn't disassociate his paintings from at least a metaphoric relationship to the world. There's a street-smart quality to his esthetic. He's a connoisseur of chaos and a cartographer of disorder. His photographs lay out a vision of apocalyptic entropy: graffiti on graffiti, vagrant dogs, wrecked chassis, scary spills, and the abstract expressionism of blood, urine, and motor oil, the gleam of trash in plastic bags, toxic stains, and demented detritus. Here's the flotsam of Office Depot farce and the jetsam of the studio apartment tragedy, a world of dreams put out on the curb and waiting to be hauled off and given a decent or at least ecologically correct burial. But even absent of image, there's true grit in the sub-stratum, in the subiconography of the work.
Jean-Michel Basquiat loved the do-it-yourself bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise.Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with fringe New York, the no man's land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle.Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world,Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions. Here is the action painting of the unconscious - accidental splashes and streaks that mark fields of blighted architecture. The over-painting of his large canvases resembles nothing more than the amateur abstract paintings that are the whitewashed windows of empty storefronts.
Wool's swirling squiggles ride the canvas with fraught exhilaration. Sometimes his knotted lines seem loopy and comic, other times they are furious or tense.When they accrete they look like cross outs, negations, but what they are crossing out is often blankness itself. They are crossing out nothing. Usually they avoid the edge, marking territory with animal energy, like a dog on a pissing marathon, extending proprietary redolence over the full scope of available space. I fuck this space up therefore I own it.
Page [1] [2]
Page [1] [2]
Sometimes, if you look at a word long enough, it stops making sense. And then you can start over again with it. We deconstruct the word and the letter and the phrase by contemplating it in skewed order, instinctively going for Scrabble logic and buried communiqués.Wool deconstructs words and de-contextualizes phrases by stacking letters at faux random. The process generates calligraphic effects, acrostic reverb, and a kind of Rubik's cubism of meaning. It's about the meeting point between the machine and hand work, between formula and expression. There are no answers here, only good questions about how characters and words work. Or not.
Unlike the swaggering abstractionists of the fifties, the purist painters,Wool doesn't disassociate his paintings from at least a metaphoric relationship to the world. There's a street-smart quality to his esthetic. He's a connoisseur of chaos and a cartographer of disorder. His photographs lay out a vision of apocalyptic entropy: graffiti on graffiti, vagrant dogs, wrecked chassis, scary spills, and the abstract expressionism of blood, urine, and motor oil, the gleam of trash in plastic bags, toxic stains, and demented detritus. Here's the flotsam of Office Depot farce and the jetsam of the studio apartment tragedy, a world of dreams put out on the curb and waiting to be hauled off and given a decent or at least ecologically correct burial. But even absent of image, there's true grit in the sub-stratum, in the subiconography of the work.
Jean-Michel Basquiat loved the do-it-yourself bilingual bricolage esthetic of Alphabet City, the district of improvisational bootstrap enterprise.Wool, another far-Eastsider, has a similar romance with fringe New York, the no man's land, the interzone, the DMZ, and the ruins of concrete jungle.Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world,Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions. Here is the action painting of the unconscious - accidental splashes and streaks that mark fields of blighted architecture. The over-painting of his large canvases resembles nothing more than the amateur abstract paintings that are the whitewashed windows of empty storefronts.
Wool's swirling squiggles ride the canvas with fraught exhilaration. Sometimes his knotted lines seem loopy and comic, other times they are furious or tense.When they accrete they look like cross outs, negations, but what they are crossing out is often blankness itself. They are crossing out nothing. Usually they avoid the edge, marking territory with animal energy, like a dog on a pissing marathon, extending proprietary redolence over the full scope of available space. I fuck this space up therefore I own it.
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Christopher Wool
Hardcover + Box, 33 x 44 cm (13 x 17.3 in.), 426 pages
$ 1000.00
$ 1000.00
Covering all work phases in large-scale reproductions accompanied by extensive texts as well as production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Limited to 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by the artist.
Christopher Wool: Paintings, installation view, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 2002. Photo (c) Jörg von Bruchhausen
Untitled, 2007. Enamel on linen, 320 x 243,8 cm
(126 x 96 in.)