Scott Short’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago indicates that for about a decade the Chicago-based painter has created arresting abstractions by means of an ingenious — and laborious — process uniting technology, chance and handwork.
The artist begins with sheets of colored construction paper that he photocopies, making hundreds of black-and-white copies of copies of copies. These not only enlarge the grain of the paper but also seem to extract patterns that are invisible to the naked eye but present on (or in) each sheet.
Short then chooses one of the copies and makes a slide of it that he projects, again reproducing the copy, this time by tracing it on canvas in oil paint. The resulting all-over patterns, unpredictable and unwilled, show as much variety as any completely planned abstractions. As Short’s titles tell us the colors of his original papers, it is tempting to think one pattern is a property of red, another of yellow, a third of blue and so on. Such thinking suggests each painting is a recollection and translation of a single color into black and white.
Two pieces on view, created before 1997, appear to be more consciously expressive, with dense, massive forms apparently growing from the superimposition of either eight or 14 portrait heads. But Short’s brushwork again is impersonal.
Only an immense diptych from last year has patches of thicker paint that one may read as deliberately individual or expressive. The remaining 16 canvases are as restrained in handling as it is possible to be.
Most of the canvases are large and vertically oriented. Yet smaller horizontals are of equal interest. It is very contemporary to explain this by declaring Short a conceptual painter, moving from the canvases he creates to the ideas about painting in an age of mechanical reproduction his works are said to embody. However, the optical stimulation of each piece is sharp whereas the philosophical and aesthetic dicta of Walter Benjamin, every art student’s favorite theoretician, have been blunted to the point of cliche through decades of restatement. In any case, Short makes physical objects that do not appear merely to illustrate received ideas on the art of painting.
Many artists have used chance mechanisms to generate works, just as many also have preferred the look of the pieces to be chilly and impersonal. Short is one of them. A few of his canvases bear a resemblance to particular works by the American Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, but Short’s are worlds away in impact, as they are drained of emotion and do not aspire toward anything sublime or cosmic.
There is, however, a certain romance behind what Short does, as is suggested by his comparing the act of painting to the punishment of Sisyphus: rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down and the process begin again. This symbolizes vain labor, but Albert Camus reinterpreted the myth, turning Sisyphus into a figure whom we had to imagine smiling. It is an image appropriate to Short as a 21st Century abstract painter.
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aartner@tribune.com
“Scott Short” continues at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., through Feb. 18. 773-702-8670.
