The enamel-soaked rice paper of Christopher Wool’s Untitled gives the illusion of depths reaching well beyond the surface of the work. Using a single shade of cerise, Wool builds up layers of pigment to create a patchwork of varying opacity which, when viewed as a whole, reads as a manual to the work’s making. Since the 2000s, Wool’s artistic output has been comprised almost entirely of abstract forms through which he explores the expressive potential of painting. This outpouring of experimentation followed a slew of retrospectives at a number of established institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland.

Describings Wool’s work as a sort of mise-en-abyme, art critic Neville Wakefield compares spending t.mes among Wool's works as akin to being caught on stage during the circular absurdity of a Samuel Beckett play. The comparison is apt as Wool’s work seems to turn in on itself, taking as its subject the process of painting. Wool explicates: “Ultimately these paintings are pictures as well… it seems obvious now, but to a nineteen-year-old the idea that a monochrome could be a picture, even a picture that might relate to nature, was something I had to wrap my mind around and was both exciting and liberating” (Christopher Wool cited in: ‘Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool in Conversation, Parts 1 and 2’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975, 2017, p. 82). The complex traces of process imbedded in the monochrome surface of Untitled can therefore be seen as a turning point in Wool’s career: at once the culmination of decades of work and the seminal moment from which his later artistic practice developed.

Wool rose to prominence in the 1980s, a decade defined by Douglas Crimps’ proclamation of the death of painting which was met with enthusiasm by the conceptual and minimalist movements in the United states who had boycotted the medium. Alongside a handful of contemporaries, including Richard Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wool sought to prove them wrong. Engaging with the medium in new and exciting ways, Wool makes the case for painting using a bold visual language which treats mark-making as the fingerprints of artistic process. Of Wool’s distinct approach to breathing life back into painting, Neville Wakefield reflected: “Dispense with hierarchy, dispense with composition and colour, dispense with pictorial order, they seem to say. Yet, paradoxically, from this confrontation with painting’s supposed civility, Wool makes an elegant and formidable case for it being alive and well” (Neville Wakefield, ‘Christopher Wool: Paintings Marked by Confrontation and Restraint’, Elle Décor, March 1999, p. 59). Proof of Wool’s animation of the medium can be seen in the expressive drips, splatters and brushstrokes which fill the white surface of Untitled, leaking colour into every corner.

The varied approaches to pigment application in the present work carry the trace of Wool’s career which spans from spray painting to stenciling, screen printing to stamping. His experimentation with technique mirrors the processes which have punctuated art history, immersing his work within art historical tradition without overburdening it. Each painting is the result of the process it took to create it, the result of chance in a way, rather than structured compositional planning. In 1993, Wool began to document his process, taking Polaroids of each step. Anne Pontégnie explains that “By recoding each step, he preserved the provisional moments of painting and created a distance that became a part of his decision-making process” (Anne Pontégnie, ‘Ghost Dog’, in: Exh. Cat., Dijon and Dundee, Le Consortium and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Christopher Wool: Crosstown Crosstown, 2003, p. 12).

Despite Wool’s preoccupation with technique in his painting practice, it is not solely concerned with formal questions. His work functions as a response to contemporary life as much as it draws upon its art historical antecedents. Indeed, his paintings largely carry with them an air of urbanity, whether in the stenciled images or dripped paint reminiscent of graffiti or the industrial palette of grey and black which dominated much of his oeuvre, of which the vibrant pink hue of Untitled is a rare exception. Heavily influenced by the sub-cultures he encountered upon moving to New York City in the 1970s, Wool embraces their anarchic spirit in his work, brilliantly exemplified in the vivacious brushwork of Untitled which threatens to spill over the edge of the paper. Over the course of his decades-long career Wool has been committed to infusing paint with this same verve and lust for life while pushing the medium, and its representational conventions, to their extremes.