A marriage is more than two individuals who happen to live in the same house. And a two-person exhibition is more than two solo shows that occupy a gallery at the same time. Or it should be. ROOMMATES at Sibyl Gallery demonstrates the potential of a two-person show to represent three things: each artist’s vision and something else introduced or amplified when viewing the work together. David Surman’s representational paintings and Ian Gouldstone’s abstract multi-media works, seen side by side, call attention to the notion of speed, how we approach different formats, and the continuing reverberations of art history.
The majority of Surman’s paintings are large, gestural depictions of wolves painted in bright colors. Louisiana is Blue Dog territory, and from the doorway of the gallery, one could assume they are looking at something similar to the George Rodrigue series, but there’s much more going on here. These cartoonish but not topical paintings are closer to Philip Guston or Carroll Dunham as the artist rummages through the canon of Western art. The wolf characters engage in activities, including painting, in The Painter (after Pablo Picasso), planting in Hope without Optimism (after Vincent Van Gogh), and dancing in Red Dancers (after Keith Haring and A. R. Penck).
The paint is applied in layers that confess how a painting is made: raw canvas, translucent washes, drawing and underpainting, and finishing detail—the literal clothes on the subject. The speed with which these were created is evident in the brushstrokes, some of them four inches wide. In some paintings where the underpainting is revealed, the dripping paint—appearing only in the underpainting—also alludes to the speed. Generally, I’m not a fan of performative drips which can resemble factory-made holes in blue jeans, preferring a person earn rather than stage the holes in their jeans and drips in their paintings. But in these paintings, the drips say, this dripping layer is more fluid than the one over it, what painters call “fat over lean,” meaning the oilier layers of oil paint should be applied over washes.
Positioned next to a vertical, mostly red and white and black Red Dancers canvas is a horizontal monitor showing black and white squares in what looks like a pixel glitch. Unsure if anything would “happen,” I stood there staring at the screen. Just as it seemed like there was nothing else to see, a black square slowly slipped out of place and joined a blocky black shape beneath it. Something about the stillness and waiting made this minimal action feel dramatic and surprisingly satisfying. It occurred to me that we are habituated to expect speed from screens. After watching the stillness and occasional cube or chunks of cubes shift and drop I felt I had embodied the slowness, calibrating my senses to it. Turning to look at Red Dancers, the whip and frenzy of paint, I felt this acceleration. The juxtaposition boosted the contrast.
The digital piece is titled The Idea of Order at Lascaux, Lascaux being the site of cave paintings made around 20,000 years ago in what is now France. It can also be found in the beginning of many Art History 101 coursebooks. The materials of Gouldstone’s The Idea of Order at Lascaux are listed as “live simulation using custom software, single board computers, monitor.” In a text message, the artist described live simulation as “software performing live through hardware in the present moment… its output is not predetermined and cannot be repeated or perfectly predicted.” The leap between a screen of black and white geometric shapes and drawings made by primitive humans is a large one, but if you do leap and make the connection, it’s rewarding. For me, the connection lies somewhere in the idea of marks on a wall and the mysterious motivation to make them. I liked the piece before I read the title, but after, I felt it slip into place within the theme of art ancestry in the show.
Next to Lascaux, Surman’s large painted diptych (a single image on two panels) is immediately recognizable as a riff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Recognizable, how? I wondered, considering the adaptation looks nothing like the original. This was the mystery. In Surman’s Lunch on the Grass (after Edouard Manet), a figure is nude, seated in profile, with his head turned to face the viewer. Though the gender and proportions are off, this is the main visual clue that the piece is a callback to Manet, “the father of Modernism.” Two wolves stand in for two more male figures in the original painting, though without the human I believe the reference would be lost. A hint of green and blue very vaguely correlates with the original, and just half a lemon represents the picnic on the grass instead of fruit and bread. It’s almost funny.
One might expect that Ian Gouldstone’s abstract multi-media works and quiet geometric serigraphs would feel at odds with—or at least disconnected from—Surman’s paintings. But the outcome of pairing these artists (”ROOMMATES”) is more layered than the messy vs. neat dichotomy of TV co-habitaters like The Odd Couple or Will & Grace. I would think painting would be the more fun and carefree roommate at Sibyl, but there is something heavy about the paintings and something more playful about the digital work.
One piece seems like an outlier, not part of either artists’ body of work on view. But Gouldman’s Black Box is a point of contact, an intersection of both bodies of work. When I arrived at Sibyl and entered the exhibition, I saw what looked like a problem. In the middle of the large and always professional space was a large blue tarp on the floor and the sound of dripping water. I saw the blue plastic move as a drop of water must have landed, though I could not see the water. I looked up at the ceiling to find the source of the leak and realized it hadn’t been raining outside. Then I noticed the cords running from the gallery wall under the tarp.