Suellen Rocca was one of the original six artists who existed the hairy who. The Chicago Artist Group exhibited three times in the city between 1966 and ’68, and then, in 1969, Walter Hopps put together the last hairy those shows in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. Almost six decades later, which continues to impress me about these artists, is that they each developed an individual visual language and started tracing this process at the start of their career. Although they may have shared sources of inspiration, their art was just as different from each other as Spanish and Italian.
The 20 paintings, drawings and objects in the exhibition Suellen Rocca: Good things and bad things At Matthew Marks Gallery Span 1964 to 2014, almost her entire career (she died in 2020), and varied in size of more than six feet long and five feet wide, to paintings on small learning and plastic wallets. By 1964, Rocca had developed its fundamental visual language, which can be described as a kind of ‘image writing’, in which a simplified graphic image of a narrow bed is used to convey some kind of meaning. The repeated placement of a hand -painted figure with other figures sets a pictographic field and invites the viewer to read in it. The deciphering of the artworks of ROCCA is part of the pleasure of encountering them.
Among the primary visual sources of ROCCA, advertisements from the middle of the century reflections and solutions for the middle class of the nation, conformist desires: getting married, buying a diamond ring, raising a family. When Rocca finally dried at home on that subject, she added surprising elements to her compositions, such as a palm tree, a person who sleeps in a bubble, immediately protected and isolated, and two open hands that reached through chattering, as if they are in a human body without a head, the latter is one of the most disturbing of her Lineaire images.
“Untitled” (2020), with this image in one of the four -accused panels, pushes us to a more ominous reading of apparently benign iconography – an empty bed, birds or during the flight, a few legs and a house – that transports us to an area of speculation. A titllless watercolor and graphic work (also 2020) consisting of four rows of repeated items that rid known visual language in the same way. The top three rows show a house, a naked woman on a large rock and a hand interspersed with a leaf. For the bottom row, Rocca makes a body that melts on a bed.
Together with these enigmatic paintings, in which the repetition of images is essential for the composition, Rocca created others who do not fit in this mold, such as “Lamp poem” (c. 1969), the edge of which is made of pleated fabric. If she had repeated this in different pieces, she would have reduced the power of this work. On the shade of a blue lamp in the middle, Rocca has depicted a house with smoke from his chimney. Lines extend from both the house and the lampshade and indicate light.
Rocca has written “OHH”, “AHH” or “MMM” in every corner of the painting. What do these break vulters mean? What do the black lines indicate that radiating “mmm” and indicate that of the house and the lamp mean? What initially seems to be a painting of a lamp becomes strange and absurd as we look at it longer. Is it about collective ambitions for domesticity and comfort in the United States?
In the mostly black and white drawing “Hidden Danger Lady” (1984–2012), Rocca portrays a creature that is crossed legs, with space made by overlapping legs and oversized pink hands, the only color in the work. The pink distinguishes the space that is determined by the legs of the figure of the black -white soil, which makes the reading of this drawing complicated.
In this and ‘lamp poem’, Rocca broadens her oeuvre and conveys her creative width and restlessness to do something new. If this drawing is an indication of what she can achieve with graphite, an exhibition of drawings of her or all the hairy ones who are artists, for whom drawings form a clear work, is justified.
In her pictographic works, especially those with domestic images (for example beds, houses and diamond rings), Rocca evokes a conflicting world. The objects, and the successful life from the middle class that they represent, are both desired and stallified. Rocca could see the banality of the American dream.
Suellen Rocca: good things and bad things Continue in Matthew Marks Gallery (523 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
