Rose Divita
By Fred Camper
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The shifting function of Divita’s one-word labels is only one of several contradictions in her work. Her intense realism often collides rather oddly with the labels. While the word “Alas” for an image of a lonely prairie road suggests the landscape is a metaphor for emotion, the field’s physicality seems to argue against reducing it to a symbol. In the same way, a dog labeled with the word “Amuse” can’t be seen only as an amusement. The image of a baby in “Alone” is full of small, subtle contradictions: lying on his back in some grass, his mouth open, the baby seems alone partly because his eyes are closed. But his clothing is covered with bright letters of the alphabet: too young to read, he’s yet clad in the language he’ll soon be taught. He’s alone but not alone, his clothes a marker of the society that will civilize him. There’s an odd, very gentle humor here too: the bright letters have a cuteness Divita usually abjures, and their arbitrary arrangement depicts language not as a conveyor of information but as a maze of incomprehensible symbols. Indeed, Divita’s use of only words beginning with “A” suggests that language is as much a game as a serious instrument.
The multiple disparities in Divita’s work create a kind of poetry out of a vividly real but centrifugal world. The crisis in her work does not revolve around representation–her wolves are there in “Allure” and “Attack.” The question is why her wolves are facing in different directions to howl, and what it means in each case. In “Allure” they’re facing the sky; in “Attack” a single wolf faces sideways, ready to leap at a target we do not see. The unfixed relationships between image and label, between parts of a single composition, and between paintings seem meant to undercut expectations, to unsettle us. The unbalanced figure in “Afraid” might serve as a metaphor for the uncertainty Divita sets up, placing the viewer on perpetually shifting ground.
One’s immediate intellectual interpretation of a work, however, is often undercut by another, subtler, usually painterly element. Andersons painted Monographs from a photograph, whose border he also painted, making it cream rather than pure white. Again, Andersons’s precision suggests a real love for the way a photograph looks–and for the way it ages.
Each reproduction is painted with care and conviction; arranged together, these heterogeneous works form a kind of symphony of doubt, inevitably raising aesthetic questions. How can both DŸrer’s and Picasso’s styles be “true”? What relationship do these differently yellowed reproductions have to each other and to the originals? The dynamic white, the space of no images, seems almost a visualization of the gaps and contradictions Andersons’s pseudo combine creates. Depicting copies of copies and the uncertainty created by competing artistic realities, Andersons yet paints each detail with so much nostalgic affection that he imbues these works with a loving poetry, a lyricism of the visible.
