Randy Hess is showing two distinct yet related groups of untitled acrylic on paper paintings at ADA Gallery. One group is scaled larger than the other, but all are on the small side of medium. Both groups are exceptionally inventive and technically accomplished, but the larger and chronologically later ones are riskier and more authoritative.
According to ADA director John Pollard, many viewers assume the first group to be computer generated, but in fact Hess outlines these abstract linear fantasies in pencil before filling them in by hand. Playful but dangerous shapes float in the middle of the white paper, reaching down, up and out with a dreamlike slowness. This slowness, combined with razor sharp edges and mathematically precise curves, is indeed reminiscent of digital creations, but they also recall Asian calligraphy and botanical ornament. Such comparisons only hint at the work’s astonishing if ultimately charming craft.
The pleasures afforded by these smaller works are relatively clear. This is not to say they are simplistic, but it does not take long to “get it.” There is no “getting it” with the larger works. They involve no joke or novel procedure or conceptual trap door. Looking at these predominately brown but widely chromatic slabs is not unlike listening to Captain Beefheart or Z’ev.
What at first appears to be a homogenous muddle soon crystallizes into structural complexity and a rich dialogue between unruly material and the artist’s guiding hand. Although not merely derivative, Hess’s touch is indebted to, oddly enough, both Thomas Nozkowski and Jackson Pollock. With their emblematically central composition and the often rounded-off corners of their blanketing fields of paint, they at first look like lithographs in which the stone itself has somehow been printed (with the exception of one horizontal piece in which the main mass is more freely brushed and pooled).
Hess sets the stage with a dim coat of paint applied with a large brush, and then introduces events in a surprising array of colors including pale blue, dirty yellow and grayed-out pink, all carefully keyed to harmonize with the initial coat. I say “initial” but it is difficult to ascertain the order of application, as transparent and opaque layers are woven together. Paint is dripped, blown with a straw, allowed to run sideways and upwards, and also carefully and not-so-carefully brushed. Effects vary from delicate latticeworks of rivulets that extend past the dominant rectangle to cloudy encrustations dead in the center. Many contain calligraphic flourishes that expand from the middle to the periphery.
These last elements echo the voice of the first group, but at a much faster pace. Some of the central configurations seem to be made of overlapping positive and negative discs, wherein moon-shaped slices are taken out of circular protuberances, as if the result of some arcane geometric method. But whatever systematic method that may or may not be at work here is not apparent, and is certainly not the scaffolding upon which these paintings hang. Instead they are the result of the artist’s own visual and fractural ingenuity.
In an era of skepticism towards the value or even the possibility of originality, many painters handle the question of what to paint by making ostensible abstractions out of readymades. Thus a lottery ticket, an algorithm, or a de-familiarized photographic transcription can serve as the underpinning for what can be arresting and beautiful work that nevertheless dutifully announces the orthodox credo that experience is always already mediated. But Roland Barthes’ description of texts as “tissues of quotations” was not an injunction that pertained to future production, but an insight that can enrich all art by divesting us of the myth of the author-hero-god.
Randy Hess knows that, among other things, his work is an impacted collection of influences, memories and vocabularies. But he further knows that the work of his own hands, without literal quotation or mediation, need not signal nostalgic denial. And the courage he shows in building up his riotous but solemn paintings, without recourse to an easily read system, should offer hope, not to turpentine-sniffing curmudgeons, but to those who still demand criticality from every medium.
(Regarding turpentine-sniffing curmudgeons: it takes one to know one.)
