Looking at The Calling, 2008, in which a sharply dressed, clean-cut couple strolls heedlessly into a miragelike shimmer of countryside, a vast female nude rearing up in front of them, seemingly from another dimension, neat resolutions seem a distant prospect indeed.

—Michael Wilson

WALTHAM, MA

Alexis RockmanROSE ART MUSEUM

Famous since the mid-1980s for painstakingly painted phantasmago-rical botanical and zoological scenes, Alexis Rockman presented expressionistic landscapes in “The Weight of Air,” his first solo museum show in a decade. Made between 2005 and 2007, the thirty-nine oils on paper, which the artist refers to as his “weather drawings,” take as their subjects hurricanes, toxic emissions, landslides, torna-does, diminishing glaciers, and evaporating seas. The quasi-abstract, often heroic images result from an improvisational and muscular han-dling of materials: Rockman pours onto gessoed paper a mixture of oil paints, alkyd resins, and mineral spirits, the density of which varies from thin wash to thick syrupy pool. Using a combination of toothbrushes, palette knives, turkey basters, eyedroppers, and spray valves, he creates energized, scumbled, and stained surfaces depicting extreme natural forces. He also uses small brushes to insert details like airplanes, bridges, trucks, oil wells, and windmills, which punctuate the lush surfaces.

Rockman based these landscapes on his own digital collages of images culled from the Internet and from magazines. Although they depict environmental catastrophes, they are more painterly and less ominous than, for example, the artist’s epic mural Manifest Destiny, 2004, which prophesied a gory apocalyptic Brooklyn waterfront fol-lowing an extreme sea-level rise. Rockman’s new works are more akin, in their loose brushwork and high-keyed palette, to his 2006 series “American Icon,” in which American landmarks decay amid lushly overgrown landscapes.

The artist’s reliance on science and geography is apparent in Aral Sea II, 2006, a densely painted image of a scorched desert wasteland alluding to the titular Central Asian sea, which has been dramatically shrinking for decades, due mostly to massive diversions for agricul-

tural irrigation. Four lone camels appear alongside a beached boat near the high horizon line, while shiny brown-black skeletal remains of another ship in the foreground remind the viewer of this area’s parched fate.

In many of his more abstract images, Rockman inflects Edmund Burke’s con-cept of the sublime with environmental warnings. Color, texture, and light are the primary focus in works like Blue Storm, 2006. This mural-size landscape is domi-nated by seductive and amorphous azure and white storm clouds in an orange sky streaked with a single white lightning bolt. Below this threatening but magnificent expanse, two tiny cars appear on a narrow road in an otherwise unpopulated verdant terrain. His smaller-scale, more spontane-ously painted works are among his most visually appealing. Orange Waterspout, 2007, is a poster-size seascape in which

the sky looms large, as in paintings by Dutch landscape master Jacob von Ruisdael. The peaceful sunset is intruded upon by a dark viscous tornado pulling water into its growing vortex. In this Turneresque image, the vertical waterspout is juxtaposed with a fi ery orange sky, while the churning sea, a neo-expressionist surface of black and brown drips, recalls Anselm Kiefer’s scarred wastelands.

Rockman’s poetic, explosive new paintings signal his departure from making often fantastical scenes overpopulated with mutated beings, and position him as a formidable landscape painter steeped in tradition yet mindful of twenty-fi rst-century dangers.

—Francine Koslow Miller

PHILADELPHIA

Carlos AmoralesPHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Carlos Amorales’s fi rst museum exhibition in the United States owed its success, partly, to the context in which the works operated and to the seductive installation Black Cloud, 2007, which consists of thou-sands of black paper moths. The creatures were scattered in the main gallery, a stairway, and the neighboring galleries, where they were affi xed, for example, to the wall next to a pristine Mondrian and in the sight line of a Jasper Johns. It was as if an infestation had occurred and bugs were attacking the institu-tion and its treasures—a con-servator’s nightmare. The moths, based on images culled from Liquid Archive, 1999–, the art-ist’s database of his own draw-ings, propose a materiality and dedicated craftsmanship that is a clear counterpoint to the phan-stasmatic aesthetics espoused by the other works on display. Indeed, Amorales is known for making drawings and fi lms depicting fantastic and ghostly images, shadows that erase individual identity in favor of archetypal, metaphamorphosing forms. Take his 2008 series “Selected Ghosts,” linear compositions in which the artist uses vector graphics to reproduce silhouettes of human fi gures, skulls, birds, spiderwebs, and trees drawn from his archive and collaged on the surface of the paper so as to suggest the evasiveness, instability, and, as the title indicates, generic and spectral status of the (digital) image in contem-porary culture.

In his animated fi lms, presented in a small room next to the instal-lation, virtuality prevails. The images have a sharp, graphic quality. The Forest, 2003, a jazzy alternation of human fi gures, trees, airplanes, and other images that move to the beat of the sound track, adopts the look of advertising (the black-silhouetted dancers in iPod campaigns come to mind). In the two other nonnarrative fi lms shown, Rorschach Test Animation, 2004, and Faces, 2007, Amorales seems interested in the liquidity and ambivalence of images and the free association of perception, showing as he does forms merging and disintegrating. The former fi lm has no sound, and its relationship to the title is quite literal, while the latter is accompanied by atonal music from the 1950s. Here the artist alludes to the chance operations and formal systems of historical avant-gardes—Dada fi lm and experimental animation are clear predecessors—and while the work is visually attractive, the overall

SEPTEMBER 2008 465

Alexis Rockman, Emission, 2006, oil on paper, 24 x 18".

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Carlos Amorales,

from a black-and-white video animation, 5 minutes 30 seconds.

Manimal, 2005, still

REVIEWS

effect is monotonous. Manimal, 2005, rendered in black-and-white three-dimensional animation, is formally and structurally different from the other fi lms. It implies a narrative, as it depicts the silhouettes of wolves moving violently through a dark, primitive-looking land-scape that spans wilderness to city via an airstrip. Julián Lede’s ener-gizing heavy metal sound track contributes enormously to the success of the work and helps bring out its apocalyptic undertones.

—Monica Amor

WASHINGTON, DC

Willem De LooperAMERICAN UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

Intended by the museum to honor one of the university’s own, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the career of painter Willem De Looper, who came to Washington, DC, from the Netherlands in

1950. He enrolled in American Uni-versity in 1953 and has remained in the area ever since. This exhibition, a retrospective of sorts, includes thirty-six acrylic paintings made by the artist between 1965 and 1998.

De Looper is often considered a second-generation member of the Washington Color School. Like its better-known adherents Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, De Looper created compositions of flowing color by staining and pouring paint onto untreated canvases, an approach that stood in marked contrast to the intense,

aggressive brushwork typical of much New York gesture painting. Untitled XI, 1965, for example, is a tulip-like abstraction composed of thinned, translucent paint layered in a manner that suggests three-dimensional space. De Looper’s staining method lent itself to working directly on the canvas without preparatory drawing and mirrored the musical improvisation the artist so admired in American jazz. It also gave his work an inherent luminosity, a quality it was never to lose.

A group of works from the early ’70s, including Toujours, 1971, which evokes aqueous veils of blue-green light, typify this approach; they also refl ect the landmark dissolution of traditional relationships (color and line, fi gure and ground) achieved through the staining tech-niques pioneered by Louis, Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. Only a few years later, however, such free-form washes gave way in de Looper’s case to a fi rmer structure of horizontal bands of denser, layered paint spread with a roller (which he also used to stamp the surfaces with coarse vertical marks). An example is Untitled 8, 1974, one of the most beautifully luminous works in the show; its mottled surface sug-gests the cool winter light of a furrowed fi eld blanketed in snow.

In the early ’80s De Looper began making more architectural com-positions of verticals and horizontals. These works, including Yellow Rectangle, 1980, echo Matisse’s paintings of open windows, some of which De Looper saw at the Phillips Collection, where he began work-ing as a guard in 1959, retiring as its curator in 1987. These, his most ambitious works (certainly in terms of size), generally have a close-value color scheme of predominantly muted browns, blues, and taupes; while some seem rather inert, the most successful have an almost autumnal feel. By the mid-’80s the fading light of these works eventually yielded to brighter colors and jazzier compositions. Untitled,

1985, is composed of angular forms whose bright reds and contrast-ing blue-black are accentuated by bold lines drawn with paint squeezed directly from the tube. By the decade’s end, De Looper was using these angular forms to create some of his best and most structur-ally complex works, like the off-balance The Duke, 1989, and the pinwheel-like Brooklyn Bridge, 1990. Moreover, around this time he began applying metallic paints (silvers, coppers, golds) to his canvases in short strokes with a trowel, creating radically different surfaces that undulate, quiver even, with refl ected light. While breaking new ground, they are, in their sensitivity to light and color, typical of De Looper. And like the other paintings on exhibition here, they reveal an artist steadfast in his means and their aesthetic possibilities.

—Howard Risatti

ATLANTA

Jack WhittenATLANTA CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER

It is fi tting that one of the works in this group of Jack Whitten’s memo-rial paintings is dedicated to the art critic and ideologue Clement Greenberg, for the problematic that Greenberg judged to be central to modernist painting is palpable in Whitten’s work. Greenberg famously posited modernism as the progressive purifi cation of each art to its essential formal characteristics; in the case of painting, this meant eschewing representation in favor of abstraction. For more than forty years, Whitten, in producing elegies to various individuals, including many African-American cultural lumi-naries, has returned again and again to the question of how a painting can simultaneously serve both the basic human impulse to memorialize and the tenets of modernist abstraction.

It is clear that Whitten’s memorials are largely subject-driven, as his style varies with the person represented. Least successful are the most literal or denotative works, where the connection between person and image seems obvi-ous. Far more compelling are those in which the connections are less apparent, or in which there is tension between the subject and the formal means.

For example, Whitten celebrates the cabaret singer Bobby Short in E Stamp II (The Black Butterfl y: For Bobby Short), 2007, a painting whose patterns derive from those that appear on downloadable postage stamps. The work is at once a painting and a mosaic, resulting as it does from a technique Whitten has employed since the early 1990s, in which he uses small squares of hardened acrylic paint as tesserae. The primarily velvety black composition is infl ected with light blue and sparkling gold tiles, with which Whitten has formed a circle and two lines dividing the square work into quadrants. While the representa-tion of Bobby Short, the epitome of smooth cabaret elegance, in rich black and gold is certainly apt, it also feels a bit obvious.

Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington), 1974, is a simi-larly elegant composition of sweeping horizontal lines of black paint streaked with ocher, deep red, and light gray. While the palette and refi nement of the image may express Ellington’s persona, the way the painting was created is arguably at odds with Ellington’s musical approach. Whitten produced the work by making a single stroke with

466 ARTFORUM

Jack Whitten, The Space Is Clement (for Clem Greenberg), 1994, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 42 x 42".

Willem De Looper, Untitled, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 100".

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