Rodney Carswell is one of the most gifted painters working in Chicago.
But while he has been here for a decade and has shown here for nearly a decade more, his first museum survey occurs at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago only now.
Part of the delay doubtless is owing to Carswell’s allegiance to abstract painting, whereas fantastic figurative art long has dominated the town.
And then there is the kind of work Carswell creates: spare, demanding, without easy gratifications. It is painting with a reserve that viewers must penetrate before it begins to repay their attention.
The show will present a selection of about 20 paintings and works on paper dating from 1975 to 1993. Carswell himself chose the pieces and, in consequence, has recently thought a lot about their connections.
“I have been consistently interested in reductive abstraction ever since I was an undergraduate in college,” he said.
“I think, in part, it’s in my nature. And, in part, it might be attributed to growing up in New Mexico, which has a history of it in the arts that are native to the place and in some sophisticated contemporary art, as well as in the way the landscape expresses itself, you know, as sort of an austere place.
“I also have had a continuing interest in examining the painting as an object, trying to make visible its constituent parts and trying to make visible the way an artist-myself, in this case-has behaved toward the object. The idea is to have the nature of the material and the act performed on the material both be evident in the object that results.”
To that end, Carswell often has taken apart his paintings, making a viewer aware of physical conditions involving the stretched canvas, the stretcher bar and how the entire piece relates to the wall.
Some canvases he mounted unstretched, folding part of the work back on itself. Others he constructed around a center covered with transparent film that permitted a view of the wall. Still others, made of multiple panels, he showed with some of the painted and unpainted panels reversed.
Such manuevers resulted from a formalist notion of autonomy: how painting should only be about painting and not refer to anything outside itself. Carswell struggled with the notion for some time and, gradually, the character of his work changed.
“At some point, the things I was making got so eccentric that-I know this sounds odd-they took on a kind of geometric anthropomorphism,” he said. “And, as a result, I got increasingly interested in how something purely founded in a kind of systematic or logical thinking and purely founded in a sort of objective circumstance could suggest or point to things we know.”
Two paintings in the exhibition he cites as examples. They echo configurations in dance but do not present figures or dance movements. In effect, Carswell has separated dancers from the dance, suggesting animation only through the rectilinear and curved shapes he has deployed on his canvases.
“I think they encourage a sort of empathy on the part of the viewer and suggest something familiar without really looking like anything,” Carswell said.
“Outside of historical interests and interests in how I make each work, my subjective interest has to do with organizing the piece in such a way that it echoes you standing there looking at it. Without picturing anything, I try to embody in the painting something that is like a ghost of a human presence.”
That embodiment comes partly from the human scale of the paintings; partly from Carswell hanging them close to the floor, the plane viewers stand on; and partly from sensuous wax surfaces that convey a large amount of detail.
“One way you could distinguish what I do from, let’s say, geometric abstraction in the ’60s or Neo-Geo artists now is in the level of detail,” Carswell said.
“That, I think, creates a bond between the works and the audience. The paintings may make a bold statement at the outset, but then they have smaller things to say as you address them beyond the introduction. I think they try to draw you into an intimate conversation, as well as having something bigger to say at the outset.”
Carswell never abstracts from nature or works from a preordained system. Instead, he proceeds from sketchbooks that generate new images he can develop.
He also does not create any of his pieces out of orthodox religious feeling, though he often has used a cruciform that evokes the spiritual content of such early modern painters as Kasimir Malevich.
“I am neither a Christian nor a churchgoer,” Carswell said, “so I saw the cruciform as being a kind of memory image from having grown up in New Mexico because it’s so prevalent there. Of course, I also saw the relationship to (Malevich’s) Suprematism and, further, a relationship to Mondrian’s simple horizontals and verticals.
“To me, the thing that’s most important (about the crosses) is that they are a kind of surrogate for simple being. I don’t mean so much that they look like figures. It’s just that, with most living things situated on the land, be they trees or humans, there is a dynamic of the horizontal and vertical in them. And, though I am interested in getting (from forms) as many associations as I can, I am ultimately more interested in that. The primary purpose, again, is to echo you standing there.
“I think you can understand what I do partly by seeing it in relationship to a figurative artist like Philip Pearlstein. I sort of reverse what he does, in the sense that he takes a figure and moves it towards abstraction. I take an abstraction and try to move it towards a figure, without illustrating one in any particular way.”
“I think (my work embodies) thoughts about being and about the human condition as I understand it through my experience,” he said. “And I think both the remoteness of the paintings that’s due to the distancing of abstraction and the intimacy that’s due to their eccentricity and detail speak to the paradox that I feel as an individual living today.
“If my paintings have a failing for me, its that they’re not subjective enough. I want to get at subjectivity through control, and I have made some works that really achieve that, but as a body I would like them to be more subjective, without being demonstrative.
“I don’t want to be a Julian Schnabel. But I do want to get at a kind of restrained subjectivity. It’s sort of like the subjectivity that’s in (an Edward) Hopper, full of restraint.
“The pressure you feel in his paintings is the poignancy of a kind of human dilemma. And that’s akin to what I mean. It has to do with trying to create a memory of something.”
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“Rodney Carswell, Selected Works: 1975-1993” will open with an informal discussion with the artist at 4 p.m. today at the Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., where the show will continue through April 18.
