Stephen Rosenthal at P420, Bologna
P420, Bologna September 29–November 3
Stephen Rosenthal began to show work in the 1970s in New York, inside the specific current known as Radical Painting, which sets out to reduce painting to its minimum components, lines and basic fields of a very few colors, generating a very high level of poetic tension. Since then, his career has moved forward in a process of coherent, natural growth. Last fall, Rosenthal was back in Italy with a major retrospective at P420 gallery, including some of his latest production. The two large rooms of the gallery in Bologna welcomed two clearly separate groups of works, tracing back through the period from 2006 to 2018.The first room contained pieces made from 2006 to 2008: they can be grouped under the name of “Islands”. The paintings are nearly monochromes (always in shades of off-white, pale ochre, or variations of almost whitish grays), composed of many brushstrokes from which light traces of dark signs previously left on the substrate struggle to emerge. “Constellations”, on the other hand, is the term the artist uses to define the works (from the last 10 years) on view in the second room, made in a diametrically opposite way, namely by subtraction, applying an initial field of color, marks and signs that are then erased with rags and solvents, leaving only minimal traces scattered on the surface in a harmonious, balanced way. The drawings clarify the approach even further, where the more graphic, calligraphic pencil trails are then removed with an eraser. These works cannot be categorized with the term abstraction, since they always preserve strong ties with experience, clinging in close proximity to reality. Italy (and Bologna in particular), with its tradition linked to painters like Morandi and artists that have worked extensively on the concept of emptiness and suspension, but while keeping faith with a relationship to everyday reality, makes it possible to recontextualize and present these works in an ideal way. Both series also transmit a “hard” aftertaste that makes the work even more intriguing and complex. The scraps of images in the “Islands”, and the fragments that have survived the cleansing process in the “Constellations”, seem to allude to the possibility of a figure, a recognizable, definable image that has nevertheless been lost. We are left with a sense of nostalgia for something that might have existed at the start of the making of the painting. Looking at the “Islands” we feel limited by the “bothersome” brushstrokes that prevent a complete, full view of that fragment of reality that might be lurking “back there.” While in the “Constellations”, the leftover “confetti” of the painting seem like the last surviving pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled, could have granted us a view of the whole.