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Painting The Impossible
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Painting The Impossible
Richard Kendall
Rebecca #1 (fig.00) is a large, voluptuous and radically conceived painting made by Terry Rosenberg in a context which, for almost any other artist, would seem unimaginable. It was executed in New York in 2001, following an idiosyncratic practice he has established in recent years: Rosenberg arranged for a professional dancer - her name provides the title of the picture - to come to his spacious Soho studio, where he had already completed several drawings of her on previous visits. This time, a nine-feet-wide, pristine white canvas was waiting, alongside a battery of paints, brushes, cloths and other devices of his own invention, with which he applies color. Once the two individuals were prepared, the model began to dance, improvising according to her current preoccupations as both performer and choreographer. There had been no rehearsal with the painter or any kind of direction from him. Gradually, their extraordinary collaboration proceeded, at once rigorous and unpredictable, intimate and remote.
As the dancer responded to the music she had chosen, her movements unfolded across the studio floor, while Rosenberg watched her intently from beside his canvas. He has described this process as an intense focusing of his senses and faculties, requiring the absorption of forms and rhythms that now surround him, and readying himself to act in his own arena. At an instinctively chosen moment, the first marks break the whiteness, followed by other urgent lines, veils of color, flourishes of hand and arm, wipings and brushings, all prompted by his fierce engagement with the woman's energy. Soon his painting takes on a dominant hue and a distinctive pattern, all of which might be transformed under further gestures or broad sweeps with rags or sponges, and the search for newly eloquent incident. Simultaneously attending to the dance and to the accelerating evolution of the picture, Rosenberg becomes both the inventor and the observer of an image that now has a defiant vitality of its own. Attacking it and coaxing it, erasing some passages and restating others, he reaches an indefinable point where the cycle seems complete, and puts down his implements. Perhaps an hour has passed, but a new, still unfamiliar form had come into being, a fusion of painting and dance that defies categorization.
Terry Rosenberg's creative project has centered on such original interactions with the ballet and with modern dance for more than 15 years. In the 1980s, after a period of making works in two- and three-dimensions that negotiated between abstraction and the human body, he transferred his concern with visual dynamism to a direct confrontation with the dance. Initially, he produced drawings in charcoal of female and male performers, ranging from vigorous, gestural studies of torsos and limbs in mid-action to near-vaporous evocations of kinetic events. A parallel group of drawings soon extended this exploration to entire dance ensembles, observed and drawn in rehearsal with the agreement of such companies as Mark Morris Dance Group, The Kirov Ballet, Dance Theater of Harlem and American Ballet Theater. Positioning himself at the edge of their practice spaces and armed with paper, oversize drawing boards, charcoal and pastels, he made high-speed notations of their clusterings and separations, of emerging and dissolving masses in the flow of time. Common to all of them was the encounter with unexpected forms, translated through his dexterity and the instantaneous rapport of eye, hand, and brain into the language of draftsmanship. Drawing has remained fundamental to Rosenberg's practice to the present day, rarely conceived as preparatory in the traditional sense, but essential to the development of his restless language. By 1997, he felt ready to embark on a series of increasingly expansive canvases, experimenting with different grounds, with stretched and unstretched surfaces, and with variously thinned and modified paints, leading to the procedure he favors today.
I first met Terry Rosenberg in the mid-1990s, in the context of an exhibition of ballet works by Degas that I was currently organizing. When he explained the nature of his project, my immediate reaction was to suggest that it was impossible: within seconds, however, I realized that this very impossibility made it irresistible, providing its own source of animation and obliquely novel logic. Because a figure in rapid movement cannot, by definition, be drawn in any conventional sense, let alone be painted, orthodox representation is excluded from the outset. In its place, the artist is obliged to find new means of response and new purposes in his activity, and to re-articulate the nature of his relationship with both dancer and painted surface. If he cannot record what he sees in a given instant, he must engage with the larger subject, with the accumulation of turns and leaps, slidings and archings to the beat of the music, and the emerging tissue of energy that is unique to this performer on one specific occasion. He looks for sympathetic marks in what he has already put down on canvas and for colors that will encapsulate something of the woman or man's presence, even as they reveal themselves to him with the passing of the seconds and minutes. As the dance advances, so his own performance dissolves and re-shapes from one moment to another, pursuing new pictorial variations until it reaches resolution. The outcome is neither a portrait nor an arbitrary effusion, but a particularized, intensely felt trace of two energized human beings in conjunction, now summarized in paint.
New artistic enterprises demand new tools, and in time Terry has evolved a graphic and painterly handwriting that is wonderfully appropriate to his self-imposed task. The drawings on paper, some of them more than four feet wide, include not just a rich variety of lines but a repertoire of streaks, smudges, finger prints and impromptu shadows that is augmented on each occasion. Working at high speed, he cannot ponder an effect or calculate his next intervention, but must react instantly, viscerally to the drama transpiring on the stage or in the classroom. These strokes and touches are as much reflexive as cerebral, almost primitive in their force and yet capable of exquisite subtlety. In the large canvases, drawn lines and their lingering association with precise description play little part, now replaced by the manipulation of colors in equally unpredictable ways. Determined to break with orthodox facture and its similarly burdensome history, Rosenberg has used fabric, house-painting rollers, and even pads attached to his arms and hands, in addition to a wide range of brushes, to produce eruptions of texture and hue that he hopes will surprise himself. Most recently, as in Subdermal (fig.00), he has covered the entire canvas with a broadly washed film of a single hue, such as apricot pink or gray blue, into which he introduces bars, strokes and traces of other colors, and from which he can wipe away lighter passages.
As a well-traveled, New York based artist, Terry has many reasons to be aware of the heritage of his activity, both as a technical venture and as a conceptual challenge. Surrounded by the great works of Degas, Eakins and Rodin in the citys museums, he knows how his earlier predecessors were entranced by the energetic body, by the blur and the fragment; in the country that welcomed Eadweard Muybridge, he is reminded of the lure of animals in motion for the pioneer photographers; as a student of the twentieth century, he has absorbed the lessons of Cubism, and of Balla, Boccioni and Severini; and as a long-time resident of Manhattan, he could hardly fail to identify with the heroic days of Abstract Expressionism. This identification can be questioning as well as respectful, allowing him to discover un-mined seams in the rich deposits of the past and new potential for exploration, risk and refinement. The intense seriousness of engagement of the New York School artists echoes deeply through his work, now further problematized as it was, in different ways, in the careers of Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn and Jackson Pollock himself - by the reintroduction of external stimuli. Confronting Action Painting with the human body in action, and conceived in the most critical terms, Rosenberg has sought to open up a space for a new generation of images.
This determination to push the genesis of his paintings into unknown and barely controllable territory, to make and re-make the imagery under an incessant barrage of sensations, is one of the most audacious aspects of a work like Rebecca. The slightly earlier picture Toshiko of 1999 (fig.00), demonstrates how such works are literally unthinkable in advance, not just because of the circumstances in which they are made and the lack of standard preparations, but in light of their fluid, mobile character. The astonishing scoops and folds of matter in this canvas, and the explosion of potency at its core, have all emerged from the wayward rituals of painting itself, many of them reformulated several times in the course of a few moments. Rosenberg speaks unforgettably of the state of nervous anticipation that such sessions provoke, and of his frequent uncertainty as they approach the end. More than once, an impending sense of disaster has urged him to obliterate much of what he has achieved, only to find a transcendent palimpsest that supercedes all his previous efforts. His images are rarely revised once the encounter is over, but several days are sometimes needed for him to come to terms with his creation and begin to evaluate it.
License of this kind will always be hazardous, but at this extreme level it holds out the promise of correspondingly extravagant invention, leading to the pulsing exuberance of Rebecca, the tumultuousness of Toshiko, and the haunting, skein-like confection of Mari Angela # 4 (fig.00). In the latter, an uncharacteristically delicate background of pale pink stains the canvas, bringing the scene as close to sweetness as Rosenberg ever approaches. Equally untypical straight lines articulate this area in several places, perhaps suggesting the perspective of the room yet without insisting on it. Against this fragility, the taut, convoluted gyrations of Mari Angela have left a climactic pattern of dips, peaks and spun brushstrokes that deny its decorativeness. Dragged and smeared paint, whites transmuted into silvers and pewter grays, lacy webs of black and rose combine in a mesmerizing cluster, with a solitary intervention of acid yellow to disrupt their harmony. Other works move in a contrary direction, towards ominous browns across an uninflected canvas or rainbow-like scatterings of primary and secondary hues. But all of them grow out of a similar setting and a comparable procedure, each one the heightened response to a singular animation, to the mysterious chemistry of personality and the exotic physics of paint on canvas.
Fundamental to these encounters is the possibility of new pictorial experience, of pressing at the barriers of visual syntax and expanding the life of painting itself. Some of his completed images are almost shocking in their promiscuous life, bursting out of the constraints of familiar technique as well as the polite protocols of modernism. Even while a creation like Rebecca pays its respects to the bounding edges of the canvas and establishes a buoyant, witty link with them, other works thrust forward out of their frames and seem to deny their planarity. It is hard to convince our eyes, for example, of the flatness of Mari Angela # 4, so intense and massive in its central chromatic force, and so complex its negotiations with its surroundings. Equally, the cutting of the trunk-like organism in Toshiko at the lower margin speaks of immense powers beyond the containing rectangle, as if we peer into forbidden territory or witness an elemental flowering. Rosenberg's endearing habit of writing across his paintings and drawings most often to incorporate the model's name, but sometimes to include exclamations heard in the dance studio takes us into yet other dimensions: not just words and sounds are added to his arsenal, but extensions into time and affective space.
The most thoughtful and self-critical of artists, Rosenberg understands the importance of the past as well as the inescapable need to make things new, to revisit his seniors and to be true to his own times. These drawings and paintings grew out of a reflective, deeply held conviction that there is more to say with colors on a plane surface, in ways that involve hazard and extreme commitment. There are few more demanding convictions for a painter to hold, at this or any other date, but it visibly gathers momentum with each of these brave, startling works of art.
Richard Kendall trained as a painter and printmaker before taking an MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has published books on Cezanne, Degas, Monet, and Van Gogh and has curated several major exhibitions of the work of Degas in Britain and the United States. He now works as an independent scholar and has written essays and reviews on the work of contemporary artists including Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, and Leon Kossoff.
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