AROUND THE GALLERIES
A can-do spirit and a comical approach
Nathan Redwood makes his L.A.
By Leah Ollman
Special to The Times
January 12, 2007
Nathan Redwood's rollicking, rapturous work at Carl Berg
Gallery has a touch of the great William Wiley's spirit — somewhere in its
subtle irreverence, its disheveled tightness, its vaguely rustic wisdom.
Somewhere in the feeling that ingenuity is the most effective compositional
device for holding a picture together and making it rattle with urgency.
This is Redwood's first solo show in L.A.,
his newly adopted home. It contains four large paintings (a fifth, in the back
of the gallery, is technically not part of the show), each packed with visual
verve and wry humor and saturated with an intriguing, elusive mood that borrows
from both doom and celebration.
The show's title, "Construction Under the Sun," itself seems
delivered with a snort. True, the forms in the paintings look hammered together
from construction debris, but their solidity feels tenuous, challenged by a
beautifully chaotic, entropic force that pervades every scene. And the sun? It
seems to have taken a long vacation from this world. A gothic pallor chills the
air in one of the paintings. A toxic grayish-yellow sky burns in another.
All of the images are devoid of humans, but each has human surrogates. What
they're doing resembles rites of survival, especially if the environments are
taken to be post-calamity. In "Space Between," bodiless gloves grip
the sides and rungs of ladders that rise, without visible support, out of a
skittish brown earth. In "Snap," two makeshift rafts bob in a choppy
sea.
Redwood paints with diluted acrylic polymers, often applying lighter tones atop
darker ones, which gives the surfaces a liveliness and dimensionality at a
determined remove from conventional naturalistic representation. Colors are
blended in a minor key, lending the whole an underlying dissonance. The
brushwork is bold. Every stroke maintains its own integrity while contributing
to the overall illusion of place, depth, movement. It's a compelling style, at
times ravishing in its effects.
In the painting of rafts at sea, for instance, Redwood crafts a spectacular
division between the water's surface and its murky, alien depths. The brushwork
of broad wavy strokes articulating the water seen from above comes to a clean
break near the bottom of the canvas. An intense light gleams just below the
dividing line, then dissipates into drippy, fuzzy streaks.
The downward flow of the paint reinforces the pull of anchoring weights (bricks
tied in rope) strangely connected to the rafts' masts. The cool, palpable
strokes defining the water's surface, the visible world, contrast brilliantly
with the warm, amorphous netherworld.
In "Conductor," a campfire scene of sorts, Redwood again combines
pigments of different viscosity to wonderfully disarming effect. The sky weeps
like runoff from corroded metal; cloud-like forms within it appear as if
extruded from giant tubes of liquid rust.
The reference to construction in the show's title applies as much to Redwood's
inventive engineering of the painted surface (the eye's path all switchback
trails and rickety bridges) as to the odd contraptions he depicts within.
Scraps of wood connect at awkward angles to form literal stick figures with
scrappy ribs and bucket heads. One, in "Conductor," wears a collared
shirt from which springs a large, unfurling coil in place of a head.
Unlikely combinations of wood and rope, stone and car tires have the
comical/mechanical air of something built by Rube Goldberg or staged by Fischli
and Weiss. There is also something in the reference to resourcefulness with
materials that brings to mind found-object assemblage. Redwood draws from
multiple sources, but the fantastic, swampy, contingent, agitated, whimsical
and foreboding concoction he creates is distinctly his own.
Carl Berg Gallery,
