Untitled

“One could superficially interpret Wool’s paintings as parodies of Pollock’s seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a Pop artist or Dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions, the work is singular, strong, organic and as deep as it might appear shallow” (G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Christopher Wool, Cologne, 2012, p. 9).

Emerging as an artist in the 1980s, Christopher Wool began his exploration of the painterly process in an art world which questioned the state of painting. In his 1981 essay “The Death of Painting”, art critic Douglas Crimp condemned the belief in painting and its tenet that the human touch was crucial to maintaining painting’s unique aura. In the midst of this period of questioning, Wool had found his stride building upon the multiple legacies of American postwar painterly abstraction, Pop Art and Minimalism actively addressing the challenges facing the contemporary artist of today.
Coming across a workman in the stairwell of his New York apartment building in the late 1980s, “Wool observed [him] applying this tawdry embellishment to the halls outside of his loft and recalls being fascinated by the considerable challenge of lining up the patterns successfully” (K. Brinson, ed., Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, p. 38). The paint rollers the workman was using were available at any hardware store in varying decorative motifs—a common, more economical choice for décor than wallpaper. In this everyday tool, Wool recognized a ready-made mechanical means of creation and with a Pop oriented mentality, the possibility of embracing multiplicity in his composition without any inherent meaning or association.
The artist’s series of “rubber stamp” paintings, begun in 1986, was so named because Wool deployed a rubber paint roller or in other cases, a rubber stencil dipped in paint and applied directly to the canvas. Wool used this method to its full advantage, employing its ability to reproduce the same image repeatedly to create paintings of repeating patterns. John Caldwell, curator of Wool’s 1989 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, elaborates, “…since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting” (J. Caldwell, “New Work: Christopher Wool,” in New Work: Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, n.p.).
The stamp maintains the same form despite the artist’s wavering hand throughout the process of reapplication. In this way, Wool is the progeny of artists like Andy Warhol, whose use of the silk-screening medium was an attempt to mechanize his own art reproduction, and yet, the medium’s dependency upon a human, in all his fallibility, to pull the print creates subtle variations from print to print. “Wool’s work shares Pop Art’s affection for the vulgar and the vernacular, and in form it recalls Pop’s graphic economy of means, iconic images and depersonalized mechanical registration” (M. Grynsztejn, “Unfinished Business” in A. Goldstein, Christopher Wool, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 266). Despite the mechanical process employed in Warhol’s screened imagery, inconsistencies due to human error and chance occurrences were unavoidable. Similarly, minor irregularities appear in the present work– a slight slip of the roller, misalignment of the floral motifs and varying thicknesses of paint. These indiscretions challenge the boundaries of the proscribed pattern. In Untitled, Wool successfully addresses the conflicts inherent to contemporary image making and simultaneously unites abstract and figurative, painting and printing as well as process and the final product.
Executed in 1987, Untitled is an entrancing large-scale example of the artist's crucial breakthrough in the late 1980s, when he started using paint rollers engraved with floral and geometric designs. Across the vast picture plane, Wool has lyrically distributed an intricate array of floral motifs, which lends the surface a lively appearance, blending baroque ornamentation with mechanic iteration. His methodical repetition reveals the energetic process of its artistic production: loosely dripping alkyd paint on aluminum. At first glance, the design appears rigid and symmetrical, but upon further inspection, the design consists of delicate curving floral motifs. As the floral motifs fills the entire composition, the incomplete forms along the edges give the impression that the pattern continues beyond the confines of the aluminum panel.
Working within a world that had announced the death of painting, Wool sought to discover new ways of innovating. Much like his contemporary Martin Kippenberger, he adopted a conceptual approach to the medium, subjecting its conventions to a strict survival test. In Untitled, we see Wool performing a kind of exploratory mission, testing the ground of his new territory. By stripping away all sense of expressive artistic intent, Wool invites paint to reaffirm itself as an independent and unpredictable medium. Synthesizing his influences from abstraction and Pop Art within a work which fuses together the abstract and the figurative, the urban and the ornamental, Wool deftly challenges the boundaries of contemporary image production through his foray with the decorative imagery and utilitarian methods.