“Painting, for me, is often a struggle between the planned and the unforeseen. The best paintings are the ones that you could not have imagined before you began…”
S inuous and lyrical, Christopher Wool’s Untitled is a superb test.mes nt to the artist’s recurrent oscillation between negation and affirmation, doing and undoing, doubt and determination. Executed in 2010, Untitled shows the artist mining his own oeuvre, drawing upon his innovative early years to create something altogether new. It is a work that encapsulates all the most sought-after characteristics in Wool’s abstract practice, from the sweeping, painterly strokes to the highly active, iconic concentric loops of spray paint on the surface. Remarkable for its richness and extraordinary depth of composition, Untitled is a tour de force that sees Wool using his most significant abstract motifs only to veil them with striated white paint, creating a dialectical tension between order and chaos. Wool detonates this polarity with virtuosity, harnessing an explosive energy while maintaining a near-impossible equilibrium.
Throughout his career, Wool has consistently and successfully persevered in exploring and expanding the boundaries of painting, a medium whose death was proclaimed in the early 1980s, just as the artist was taking his first artistic steps. From the very outset, Wool has focused his attention on the process of painting rather than on the subject itself, using both traditional methodologies and unorthodox techniques in equal measure and adeptness. In his highly innovative practice, Wool marries seemingly antagonistic influences and procedures to create a sensational body of work; at once characterized by the combination of gestural marks– indexical of the artist’s hand, and often seen as relating to Abstract Expressionism– and mechanical means of reproduction that include house-painting rollers, rubber stamps and, more recently, screenprinting and computer manipulation.
It is these latter forms of production that the artist has chosen for Untitled, in which multiple screens have been layered and then overlapped with broad swathes of white paint and looping black lines in a palimpsest-like composition. Here, Wool skilfully blends the detached, controlled aspects of silkscreen printing with the energetic, immediate and urgent pace of the lines that intertwine and coil directly on top of it, and the wide strokes which attempt to disguise them. In a manner characteristic of his mature work and arguably reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s late paintings, Wool often uses his own output as the source material for his silkscreens, revisiting and often using enlarged details that accentuate the abstract nature of the originals. As his friend and fellow artist Jutta Koether describes, Wool’s screenprinted works “picked up painterly fragments from the big pictures, recognize elements in them, and tell them of their outer limits. Through their displacement, new rhythms were introduced” (Jutta Koether, “Adequacy, No! On the Process of Productive Perversion or Defacement: The Paintings of Christopher Wool,” Parkett, no. 83, 2008, p. 160). Indeed, in its amalgamation of black and white screens and swirling lines, Untitled is a stunning example of the acclaimed artist’s ability to incorporate the lively rhythm of his own painterly gestures to the repetitive cadence of the screenprinting process.
"I define myself in my work by reducing the things I don’t want – it seems impossible to know when to say ‘yes’, but I know what I can say ‘no’ to… It’s easier to define things by what they are not than by what they are.”
Delivering an arbitrary yet carefully orchestrated palimpsest of erased and over-written abstract gestures, Untitled deploys an eloquent denouncement of color, composition, and form. Indeed, defined by its occlusions and white-washed erasures as much as forcefully spray painted loops and frenetic scribbles, Untitled masterfully pairs drastic urgency with Wool's cool and utterly inimitable detachment. As cogently elucidated by Katrina M. Brown: "Wool controls the chaos, to offer us a kind of primary viewing, the image as a pre-linguistic, pre-thought.mes ans of communicating. With their grand scale, bold unapologetic presence and their stark black and white confidence, Wool's painting seem like an indescribable urban cool, a tense fusion of intellect and emotion, control and chaos" (Katrina M. Brown, Contemporary Magazine, Winter 2003, cited in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, New York 2008, p. 296).
