WALLACE AT NEPTUNE: AN ELEVATED EXPERIENCE
by Claudia Rousseau
The Gazette
November 5, 2008
Paintings by David Wallace are the inaugural exhibit in the newly re-opened Gallery Neptune on the second floor of the renovated PeriPoint building in Bethesda. With the phrase "art in the air" as her motto, Elyse Harrison's gallery now commands a view of the busy intersection of Wilson Lane, Old Georgetown Road, Arlington Road and St. Elmo Avenue through its oversized windows. Wallace's paintings, with their references to signs and advertisements, seem especially appropriate for this elevated experience
The series of works on view is a departure for Wallace, whose trajectory has moved somewhat dramatically from the delicately constructed collages he showed about four years ago to larger works hand painted on wood panel with simplified imagery, text and the addition of color. The current paintings - still on wood panel and still combining disparate elements of image and text - are even larger in format, an average four to six feet in height or width. The small paper collages, which the artist had suggested were "artifacts of an imaginary past by using pieces of the real one...," had a strongly surrealist aesthetic and formal language. By piecing together bits of old prints and photographs, correspondence and other ephemera he found in attics or estate sales, Wallace recreated a past aesthetic in a personal idiom. In transitioning from this graphically complex phase into the bolder imagery of the painted works of a couple of years later, and certainly in the current works at Neptune, Wallace has moved away from a direct dependence on and evocation of the past toward a more contemporary expression that still connotes a layered idea of time.
Some of the literary irony of the collages is sustained in these new works, although this is combined with a new interest in surface effects and manipulation of media. As a graphic designer, Wallace is comfortable combining words and images taken from popular culture. In addition to imagery culled from old magazines and newspapers, the look of old advertising billboards more generally inspired many of the works here. Further inspiration came from things seen on a trip last year to South Korea with the Squonk Opera, a performance art group that combines theater, music and visual elements into "operatic" presentations. "Begging the Question," the artist's title for the series, refers to the way the juxtaposition of text and image is frequently unexpected, begging the question of meaning. In this case, as in Wallace's previous work, the answer is open-ended and will vary with the viewer's own experience and knowledge.
The technique employed is of interest. After scanning some of the imagery into his computer, the artist enlarges and projects them onto the prepared wood panel. There's something wonderful about Wallace working on wood panel, as artists commonly did before the 16th century, carefully sanding it, then painting it with layers of house paint. These layers are sanded again, to create a past within the work itself, revealing passages of various undercoats on a surface distressed in some places to create texture. On top of this, the images are hand painted - not screened - and often cut off. Sometimes the painted texts are an imitation of commercial printing, and sometimes a loopy script. In each case, the juxtaposition will generate a series of new ideas and meanings, many reflecting the original image's hidden or suppressed significance.
"Honeydew," among the largest works, features a man's face, cut off at the top, in a square marked to look like it was taped onto the panel. Above it a bit of painted text provides multiple definitions of the word "honeydew." In the lower right hand corner are the words "Adults Only." The combination plays with the idea of celebrity, adult movies and, inevitably, with exploitation. An interesting addition to the surface of this work, and to a number of others in the show, is a large area of white paint applied in broad abstract expressionist strokes. This immediately brought to mind Andy Warhol's early paintings that also combined popular imagery, such as a refrigerator ad or a comic strip character, with similarly expressionist white paint strokes and deliberate drips that created a new "fine art" environment for the commercial image. The allusion would, of course, "beg the question" of the art historical pedigree of Wallace's new works, and about the insular commentary on the art process itself they may suggest.
"Artificial Flowers" is another image that juxtaposes a typical commercial image with text that, among other things, brings out the underlying suggestions of sexual innuendo in advertising. The enlargement of the printed features of a smiling woman's face results in the appearance of the Ben Day dots that Wallace carefully renders on an especially layered and nuanced surface. A black cartouche that looks like it might come from an Asian source is right above the words "Artificial Flowers," half seen along the bottom. Fanning out like a halo around the woman's head are words that probably come from an ad for a kitchen appliance: "mixes, mashes, creams, whips, beats." The sheer richness of the combination of elegant visual effects and literary, art historical and pop culture references in this, and the other works in this exhibit is both intellectually provocative and compelling.