The Thinker

Robin Rice on Visual Art: John Zinsser's Abtract Memory

by Robin Rice

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Published: Feb 9, 2011

A poor workman blames his tools, but sometimes a good artist deliberately chooses a tool that's misused or unpredictable. Painter John Zinsser brilliantly uses a trowel — not a brush or palette knife — to different stylistic, but equally abstract, ends. For him, an unconventional process becomes an elaborate, sophisticated practice. Zinsser's self-created technique is old-fashioned in its commitment to the physicality of art-making, valuing the hand at least as much as the head. On the other hand, the Modernist reinvention of skills intrinsic to Western painting and rejecting centuries of earlier tradition is hardly new.

Sometimes Zinsser trowels on paint like mortar, so thick it curls up into low relief. In works like the red-on-black Dream Systems, the trowel drips and drizzles creamy paint calligraphically and gently compresses it to develop capillary feathering. The edges of the rectangular trowel are reiteratively recorded as a grid. On occasion, it suggests the grid printed on East Asian writing paper — each unit meant to orient a single character. Drops, flows and squiggles in Zinsser's painting communicate the intentionality of writing even when the message is a cryptic as a dream.

This single tool, the trowel, has multiple personalities in Zinsser's hands. Often in these paintings from the last five years, he uses silver metallic pigments. Some pieces offer strong contrasts; others occasion soft, ductile interactions, but there are always two colors only. These are precisely recorded: Memory Trace [2010, silver/mixed cobalt violet gray, enamel and oil on canvas]. The first named is the field or ground color and the second, the expressive, nonrepresentational figure or image. In a few pieces — Geometry and Ego is one — the foreground pigment covers so much of the canvas that one might be tempted to call it monochrome, but there's always an exposed edge, the visible evidence of what came first.

Zinsser's commitment to lush, well-orchestrated accidents reminds us of nature. His use of engineered pigments, silvers, rust primer and alkyds keeps us in the artifice of civilization.

In both rooms of the gallery, owners Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling have intermingled the paintings for which Zinsser is well-known with a unique series of drawings of a startlingly different character. Everything is controlled and representational. Zinsser's tools, mostly graphite pencil and paper, are similarly ordinary and accessible.

In these acts of homage and meditation, Zinsser reproduces art works he admires, not by observing them directly, but by painstakingly copying them from Christie's or Sotheby's auction-house catalogs. Each staggeringly precise drawing fully represents one catalog page, including all the text. Zinsser used a light table to note measurements (for Jasper Johns' layered numbers, he also employed a French curve) but drew, not traced, everything else. The high quality of catalog reproductions was one attraction. Then, there's the implied attraction of potential ownership. The auction-house's valuation appears in the description of every work, but Zinsser got them all without spending a dime.

He "got" them in some deep, unfathomable way by spending time. He had to study each piece down to the very last detail, meditating like a monk lost in the contemplation of a mandala. In some cases, such as Jasper Johns, NUMBERS (F. 61), he even drew the same page twice.

Zinsser's modernist pantheon is here, no doubt. They're mostly abstractionists like Johns, Marden, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly (especially delicate) and Robert Ryman. Sensibilities like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat are also present.

The unusual hanging of the show encourages the consideration of discipline united with a high level of tactile and visual sensitivity and devotion. All are common elements of Zinsser's meditations on representation and process.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

John Zinsser: Abstract Memory | Through Feb. 26, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, 43 N. Second St., 215-925-5389, artnet.com/lbecker.html.

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