Not, Not

Widely considered to be among the most important painters working today, Christopher Wool has reimagined painting for the 21st century, creating an influential body of work that manages to be both thought-provoking, irascible and elegant. Created in 2004, the cleverly titled Not, Not is a classic example of the artist’s Gray Paintings. Here, the artist renders a series of looping, angular and crisscrossed swoops of black enamel that have been smeared, effaced and erased, to create a towering array of cryptic marks submerged within an ethereal gray field. With an active surface that’s entirely alive with the gesture and erasure of the artist’s hand, made by using turpentine or solvent-soaked rags, the painting exemplifies Wool’s celebrated technique. The result—not quite a painting in traditional terms, yet not not a painting, as its ironic title implies—lends credence to the critical acclaim afforded to the artist.

Not, Not illustrates the signature style of Wool’s Gray Paintings, in which a range of enigmatic black marks have been partially obscured with wet rags and wide brushes soaked in solvent or turpentine. An epic arrangement of these cryptic cyphers lingers amid the soft, gestural swathes of delicate gray, that range in hue from pure white to smoky gray to the smudged color of smeared newsprint. All of these exist in a tenuous state of equilibrium, as the thin black forms seem to rise upward and out of the pictorial gray ether. The eye instinctively traces the outlines of each black line, wending its way through and around in a relaxed, languid state, only to reach the end of one line and begin again with another, as it settles back into the pictorial abyss. The ghosted remainder of previous lines that have crisscrossed and overlapped can be viewed beneath the many layers of erasure. In this, a painting that seems to deny so much of the traditional methods of painting, the artist’s hand remains a powerful visual force.

The artist developed the erasure technique that would become the hallmark of his Gray Paintings around 2000. As the legend goes, the artist became frustrated with a painting that he was working on, and took up a rag soaked in turpentine, hoping to blot out the offending mark. He applied the rag to the painting’s wet surface and—in a moment of serendipity—the rag dragged over the paint and left a smeared, yet oddly beautiful, effect that the artist embraced. This technique, born out of chance yet fueled by the artist’s inner inquisitiveness, would become the primary modus operandi of the Gray Paintings. Not, Not is a lingering example from this formative era, in which the element of chance is merged with the vital gesture of the artist’s hand.

“Nearly every time I see a Wool I’m hit with a bracingly specific retinal buzz,” the New York art critic Jerry Saltz has written in his review of the artist’s work, describing it as “something brash and beautiful” (J. Saltz, “Hard Attack,” The Village Voice, December 8, 2004, p. 78). Indeed, from his early text paintings that had been inspired by black letters spray-painted on the side of a white van, the artist has been informed by the gritty streets of downtown New York and its graffiti culture to advance the formal techniques of painting. Like graffiti artists, Wool makes use of a limited set of tools to create something that’s new. He invents an artform that’s visceral and raw, capable of reasserting in a primal way the importance of the painter and the singularity of his voice.

As Saltz reminds us, the tools of the artist’s trade are those not traditionally thought of as relating to painting: spray-paint, stencils, stamps, paint rollers, Xeroxes of previous work and solvent-soaked rags. Using a limited palette of only black and white, and deliberately making use of non-art materials, Wool creates then refutes the nature of painting itself. This back-and-forth process parallels the way in which his cryptic black cyphers emerge from a shadowy abyss, only to sink back into oblivion. They exist in a liminal state, where everything is in flux and nothing is certain, not unlike the uncertainties of modern life itself. “Wool is a very pure version of something dissonant and poignant,” Saltz explained. “His all-or-nothing, caustic-cerebral, ambivalent-belligerent gambit is riveting and even a little thrilling. It’s what makes him one of the more optically alive painters out there” (J. Saltz, ibid., p. 78).

In one fell swoop, Christopher Wool has created a new painterly language, which blends the gestural immediacy of the artist’s hand with the utter negation of paint itself, thereby establishing a break with all that came before him, but allowing him to find a way to walk bravely into the future. And even though it is a painting born of erasure, Not, Not strikes an odd kinship with the abstract visual idiom of the Abstract Expressionists, especially the early black-and-white abstractions of Willem de Kooning, as exemplified in his Attic and Zot (both 1949, Metropolitan Museum of Art), in which a range of cryptic black cyphers and brief, painterly marks are submerged within a thick field of creamy white pigment. As de Kooning had relied upon traditional oil paints and applied them in heavy, impasto-laden strokes, Wool veers toward the opposite end of the spectrum, creating a barely-there scrim of a surface that’s been leached of all color, save for the effects of black and white. In this way, Wool seems to have taken the visual language of abstraction pioneered by artists such as de Kooning and exploded it—blowing it up to larger-than-life dimensions, reducing it to black spray-paint graffiti tags, and then erasing it all in wide, definitive swoops of the brush or rag. Oddly though, Not, Not exudes all the painterly bravado and artistic gravitas of the greatest Abstract Expressionist painters, making it paradoxically traditional yet utterly modern.