Rainer Gross: Fingertip-Tingling
By Fred Camper
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Gross’s warm, glowing Lasso might seem welcoming at first. But one soon becomes aware of several different elements in this large painting almost struggling with one another. Gross in fact painted it in layers, beginning with a yellowish one underneath, then bluish drips in a grid, then an “amorphous flesh tone” in puddles left in the center to dry, and finally small blue gray dots in rows over the whole surface. “I wanted you to be able to read all four layers,” he says, mentioning as one inspiration Adobe Photoshop, which allows the computerized layering of images. What makes the painting so striking is how different each layer is in its effects. The grid formed by the drips is often broken and irregular: though grids in minimal art communicate an idealized geometry, Gross’s handmade grid is a torn, imperfect fence. The allover dots add an almost decorative element, while the puddles of fleshy orange and red shine with an ethereal three-dimensionality, hovering over the canvas in the manner of a Rothko rectangle. The brightest of these glowing areas are in the center, suggesting an unnamed significance.
This qualified view, that all imagery is provisional, made me think of Gerhard Richter, who seems to be making a similar point with his different styles of painting. Gross says Richter is not a major influence, however, though he sympathizes with Richter’s shift in styles and his questioning of “what constitutes a painting.” Perhaps Gross’s paintings are strange because he seeks “what I personally haven’t seen and what no one possibly has seen. I try to make something that startles me.”
One clue to the profoundly disorienting effect of Lackey’s markers comes from the more colorful areas of paint at the bottom of most. The bright vertical streaks in Marker 6 are rare in the center but form a dense reddish skein toward the bottom. I initially read this as a clustering of the paint that had dripped from various holes, but there are too few holes and too many streaks. It seemed more plausible that the clustered streaks had dripped up from the bottom, from clumps of wet paint, petering out before they reached the middle–and in fact Lackey said she often turned these ovals while working on them.
