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“‘The telos of artistic form,’ the artist Paul Chan insists, is a ‘spirit of irreconcilability.’ As Chan knows well, this principle runs counter to traditional ideas of art as reconciliation—as the production of both a composed work and a composed viewer. He advocates this spirit of irreconcilability because this making-and-unmaking of the object might inspire related movement in the subject.”
— Hal Foster, “Conspirators,” in What Comes after Farce ?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle -
The abstract notion of “layering” comes with certain—perhaps well-deserved—cultural baggage. Thematic density achieved via layers of meaning, through which works mean simultaneously everything and nothing, is a convenient conversational trapdoor through which to exit difficult conversations; a dangerous kind of cop-out that forfeits the viewers’ need for concision and artistic accountability. But what about when an artist layers both the theoretical and the visual in order to both facilitate and hinder the process of decoding the image, and thus meaning-making? This becomes an altogether different consideration — a project in vulnerability that manifests the very murkiness of “layering” in the abstract, visually demonstrating the difficulty in parsing influences and casting the artist as both author and subject, keyholder and destroyer. The result is process as an end in itself, leaving the resultant density holding legible meaning, even when its individual layers lack this legibility. Ultimately, the viewer can sense the anxiety and frustrations around finding coherence within personal or social narrative.
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Such is the work of New York-based artist Dylan Rose Rheingold. Rheingold, a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts MFA program, has long been interested in questions of narrative; she authored and illustrated a children’s book before she left high school, on her way to a BFA in Illustration from Syracuse. It is the familiarity with convention, however, that allows the artist to manipulate, and ultimately rearticulate, popular motifs in her more figurative work. When rendering her trademark girlish figures, the viewer is let into the inner worlds of these “characters” through the totems that litter their surroundings: rubber duckies, neon-coloured toe nails, or nostalgically for any New Yorker, the Bud Light 6-Packs and metonymic rows of Marlboro Reds, in one piece aptly titled Zip Code?, a reference to the usual refrain of every Bodega trying to suss out underage drinking.
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Yet, while able to capture these adolescent moments with precision, Rheingold uses the layering of media to evoke the burdensome anxiety these moments of growing up are often fraught with.
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Using a variety of materials—it is not uncommon for Rheingold to use oil, acrylic, and marker all in one piece—sketchy, distorted, almost shivering scenes take shape on the canvas. This is particularly true of Rheingold’s earlier works; figures and objects remain distinct, albeit vibratory. However, more recently, these figures become distorted, their lines and tones blurring and reaching closer and closer to abstraction, their situational “excess”—the inner turmoil of an adolescent or young adult, magnified through the obsessive nature of inexperience—breaking out of the bonds of physical form.
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This is more than just representing fear; this is expressing the irreconcilability of the adolescent self with the binding structures of age, or socially, adulthood. Rheingold’s work refuses to sublimate the adolescent subject into a social or tropical box, providing the space instead for that condition to quite literally burst at the seams. Anyone who has been seventeen knows the feeling Rheingold is invoking, and in turn, can attest to the insufficiency of anything staid or placid to evoke it. As such, this becomes expressed visually through the inchoate, visually irreconcilable amalgams of color and form, at times making figures near-impossible to perceive, each line seemingly leading to a dead-end. Rheingold has progressively become more experimental towards these ends: figuration and abstraction become almost inseparable as the artist works to express interior expression alongside exterior composition.
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Now, Rheingold looks to meld these two elements—interiority and exteriority—entirely. Almost completely abandoning form (at least, to the casual viewer) through repeated, unrelenting layering of media, she clouds the viewer’s perception, while hints of figuration eek through the painted ramparts. A hand? A bra, underwear. While Rheingold has previously used more visual motifs, the artist uses text (at times poetic, at times painfully blunt) to help guide understanding here. In one piece, the work declares My Leaves are Falling, evoking notions of ageing, or “deflowering”. Another, I am Growing but I am Bleeding, references, rather forthrightly, the inherent trauma in menstruation. Emotion does not burst at the seams here, instead becoming all-consuming. From this morass, however, the adolescent subject squeaks through: flashes of pink, yellow, and blue allow the viewer to contextualize the image.
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The result is perhaps Rheingold’s most ambitious work to date, and certainly that which most entirely encapsulates the themes through which she has been working. All that remains now is to see how the artist tames this unshackled beast.
Artist Spotlight: Dylan Rose Rheingold: New Works with an Original Text by Jacob Barnes
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