An explosive masterpiece from Wool’s celebrated series of 'Spray' paintings on aluminum from the mid-1990s, with the present work Christopher Wool secures his legacy as one of America’s most important painters. It is a work that encapsulates all the most sought-after characteristics in Wool’s abstract practice, from the outsized vine on the right to the hugely active drips of white pigment and iconic concentric loops of spray paint on the surface. There is an urgency and beauty to the work, which sees Wool elevate the graffiti scrawl to the realm of the sublime, and this spirit aligns it with the best of Wool’s ‘Word’ paintings, such as Apolcalypse Now and Untitled (Riot). Perhaps most significantly, the aluminum substrate, which Wool ceased to employ at the end of the 1990s, allows the paint to sit directly on the surface without any of the absorption we see in canvas works. This creates a striking juxtaposition between the textured, almost transparent surface of the remarkable white overpainting with the shiny glossiness of the black enamel. Remarkable for its richness and extraordinary depth of composition, Untitled is a tour de force that sees Wool mine his aesthetic vocabulary, using all his most significant abstract motifs only to erase them with white paint to create a tabula rasa on which to assert the primacy of his sprayed loops. At its core, Untitled is dialectical tension between opposing forces: black and white, order and chaos, choice and accident, mechanical and gestural: a jet-black labyrinth sizzles against broad swaths of milky white; repeating dotted and floral patterns compete against powerful spray-painted gestures; tightly rendered forms give way to inky drips and shadowy speckles. Wool detonates these polarities with virtuosity, harnessing their explosive energy while maintaining a near-impossible equilibrium.

Untitled choreographs an exhilarating collision between mark and mistake, beauty and defacement, chaos and grace. Achieving a distinctly post-Punk attitude of intentional indifference, the slick coils and drips of Untitled powerfully invoke the gritty crucible of 1990s downtown Manhattan in which Wool began his practice. Representative of an era defined by the disruptive energy of the Punk and New Wave scenes, Wool’s paintings challenge theories of postmodern painting to present the viewer with a singularly engaging and rigorous conceptual experience. Like hastily stenciled graffiti or heralded tabloid headlines, Untitled summons the industrial severity of the urban environment: indeed, reveling in the rhythmic intensity of calligraphic rebounds, Wool’s rebellious lines powerfully evoke the iconic markings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist similarly influenced and inspired by the guttural, adrenalizing energy of downtown New York.

Layer after layer, Wool ramps up the complexity of the composition by probings the depths of his own iconography; as motifs collide and overlap, individual components skip and stutter in turbulent growth. This process of creation is informed by Wool’s love of music, and the way in which Untitled sees the artist remix and sample his own oeuvre to create something altogether new speaks directly to the Jazz and Hip-Hop that inspire him. This effect, in tandem with the insistent urbanity of his work, evokes the spirit of Downtown New York in fashion analogous to Basquiat. It was at this t.mes that Wool was working with photography to create East Broadway Breakdown, his seminal series of photographs of his neighborhood in New York, and the heroism that Wool conjures with his images of the dereliction is in evidence here as well, with the sprayed line and aluminum base invoking Urban art and graffiti.

Wool then commits a courageous act of erasure by attacking the aluminum plane, heretofore covered in dense pictorial content, with a sheet of silky white enamel. Like a coat of liquid correction, his full painterly brushstrokes intermix with and obscure the underpainted layers of black, creating luscious greyscale fades that recall the monochromatic interplay in the Abstract Expressionist canvases of Franz Kline. In decimating the groundwork he had previously laid, Wool interrogates his own artistic enterprise: “He lays siege to the rudiments of his own painting language to embark on a fitful construction process that not only allows for mistakes and false clues but actively exploits them.” (Joshua Decter, “Christopher Wool: Luhring Augustine Gallery,” Artforum 34, September 1995, p. 89).

Like Robert Rauschenberg with his Erased de Kooning Drawing, Wool advances visual and conceptual discourse through the act of effacement, channeling Punk and Dada discourses to effect a form of nihilism, which unlike Rauschenberg he directs upon his own works, rather than that of others. In so doing, Wool attains a form of transcendence in his abstraction. In effacing and erasing his previous work Wool projects an almost spiritual claritys , despite the fury and vigor of his gestures, and elicits comparison to artists such as Mark Rothko and Brice Marden, whose abstractions serve as a meditation upon the human condition.

By introducing a neutralizing spread of white, Wool creates a tabula rasa on which to project his distinctive spray-painted lines. Employing the use of a large spray gun and liquified enamel paint, Wool feverishly assaults the picture with a frenzy of corkscrews. Often compared to the fluid coils of Jackson Pollock, or the concentric loops of Cy Twombly, Wool’s lines remain unique to his touch, their distinctive character perhaps best described by Glenn O’Brien: “Wool’s swirling squiggles ride the canvas with fraught exhilaration. Somet.mes s his knotted lines seem loopy and comic, other t.mes s they are furious or tense.” (Glenn O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper” in Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2008.) Vibrating within the crisp confines of the support, the gleaming skeins of enamel spray within Untitled pulse with the emphatic vitality and raw, barely contained vigor that mark the very best of Wool’s radical painterly oeuvre.

A culmination of Wool’s abstract efforts of the late 20^th century, Untitled is a tour de force in which the artist synthesizes his most urgent painterly concerns. Like Untitled (Riot) is to his series of stenciled letter paintings, Untitled best represents the ‘Spray’ paintings as a thunderous declaration of Wool’s artistic agenda, pushing at the boundaries of the medium to achieve new optical heights.