Barry Schwabsky on Rackstraw Downes

WHATEVER YOU THINK realism means, Rackstraw Downes is actually some form of realist—and, furthermore, one whose elective subject material is panorama. That in itself suggests a quixotic temperament in an artist born in 1939 whose quick contemporaries embrace any variety of summary, Conceptual, and efficiency artists however few realists—a minimum of of his stature.

And even amongst painters pursuing realism in his era, Downes seems like an outsider. Even supposing he edited a priceless assortment of Fairfield Porter’s writings, there’s nothing in his work of the intimism and subjectivity of the artists who adopted Porter’s lead in updating what Downes recognized as “the virtually unintended unpretentious home conditions in Vuillard.” Nor—although his landscapes might sound, at first, to have been seen by a fish-eye lens—did Downes take his cues from the digicam, because the photorealists did. A related precursor is perhaps discovered within the cool empiricism of Philip Pearlstein, however Pearlstein used the studio as a closed-off visible laboratory, whereas Downes, till not too long ago, was an odd kind of “post-studio” artist.

Unusually sufficient, Downes’s fascination with land—city or in any other case—as a website of battle and contradiction reveals extra affinity with the concepts of Robert Smithson than with any of his fellow painters. Downes’s urge has been to maneuver out into the world, to let himself be surrounded by its visible chaos, to take in the particulars in addition to the final buildings each of dense city websites and of these less-seen locations that, as Smithson as soon as put it, “exist and not using a rational previous and with out the ‘massive occasions’ of historical past”—the place the “panorama was no panorama . . . a form of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur.” With out explicitly addressing Smithson’s putting notion of “ruins in reverse,” Downes expresses a lot the identical factor in observing, “Rubbish and sewage and industrial effluent are traits of a panorama all of us assist to make. Constructions rusting within the New Jersey Meadowlands”—considered one of his recurrent portray websites—“are to US industrial would possibly because the tombs and aqueducts of the Campagna have been to the Roman Empire.”

A latest exhibition of Downes’s drawings at New York’s Betty Cuningham Gallery provided a putting alternative to rethink his artwork and to witness its late-life entry into a brand new and much more profound part. Removed from casual sketches, Downes’s panorama drawings might be elaborate—surprisingly so, given his insistence that he has by no means painted from them, that they’ve by no means served as later reference materials for a studio apply. He paints as he attracts, on the spot—an enormous portray can take as much as 100 plein air classes. “I draw,” he has stated, “to not set up something however to realize acquaintance with a spot. A drawing, for me, is sort of a first acquaintance with an individual.” Downes’s earnest quest is to know his topic as deeply as potential. He likes to cite John Constable: “We see nothing really until we perceive it.”

How a lot time does it take to grasp a spot? I received to questioning what number of home windows might be seen within the buildings depicted in one of many earliest drawings at Cuningham, Trying Down from the Window of a Good friend’s on the Higher West Aspect, ca. 1975, however stopped attempting to rely after a few hundred. I began to assume drawing these home windows will need to have been a form of meditation that allowed the artist to stay to at least one spot with out getting distracted. Nevertheless it goes past that. The piece makes you concentrate on the mass of nameless humanity inhabiting New York’s condo buildings greater than it makes you concentrate on one man doggedly limning rectangles inside rectangles.

Different cityscapes aren’t fairly so insistent on the small print; they’re nonetheless there, however in a subtler manner. Hudson River Sewage Remedy Plant Below Building, 1996, hits you with its sweeping diagonals, which appear to guide you at pace throughout its almost three stretchy toes of floor—the lengthy, low constructing of the title; the elevated Henry Hudson Parkway behind it; after which, extra faintly, the New Jersey Palisades and the George Washington Bridge within the background. And but there are humorous particulars that draw you in, just like the row of vaselike balusters alongside the overlook within the decrease proper—loosely indicated however legible sufficient—or the little dots of individuals beneath the tree within the distance farther up the correct edge. What these particulars let you know is that what this drawing presents will not be, as it’d first seem, a single scene however a mess of scenes stitched collectively. The eyes that noticed the overlook didn’t accomplish that whereas noting the shapes of the buildings throughout the river—these items couldn’t have been seen concurrently.

As with most of Downes’s work, it’s clear that what we see on this drawing has been synthesized from a multiplicity of viewpoints, a synthesis achieved initially by a form of cinematic panning—a pivoting from a set place—but in addition by a shifting depth of focus. And within the drawings, in contrast to within the work, this multiplication of views is made patent at a bodily degree by the additive development of the paper assist. Hudson River Sewage Remedy Plant Below Building, for example, is drawn on three sheets, of which the broader central one retains the torn holes that present it to have come from a wire-bound sketchbook. So the artist began the drawing with a extra narrowly horizontal view in thoughts after which added sheets on the left and the correct to reach on the thirty-five-inch-wide work. And the 2 facet panels have been drawn with a notably softer, looser contact, the marks much less densely massed, than the middle panel, as if to display that the fluctuating imaginative and prescient can not, in spite of everything, see every part at equal decision.

One other oddity: Apart from the highest and backside edges of the paper itself, there are hardly any horizontals. Traces that approximate the horizontal all the time grow to be barely angled or, extra typically, arched. Certainly, the best way every part curves towards and away from the viewer is one other clue, perhaps essentially the most blatant, indicating the shiftings of viewpoint that go into making these drawings. The impact is disorienting, pleasurably so, as a result of it provides you the sensation of getting tapped into an expanded sensorium, of having the ability to see excess of you’ve got ever been in a position. However the pleasure doesn’t efface the disquiet. At first, I discovered it onerous to place my finger on why, however then I considered one thing I had learn way back, a comment by Maurice Merleau-Ponty that appeared to outline the distinction between taking a look at an image and being on the earth: The reason being, fairly merely, that “the world is throughout me, not in entrance of me.” Against this, the world that seems in these drawings doesn’t fold itself round me however veers away. Its grandeur doesn’t embrace me.

Like most of Downes’s work till pretty not too long ago, seven of the 9 giant on-site drawings within the present have been of exterior scenes. Simply two of the latest, from 2006, confirmed interiors—considered one of a fellow artist’s studio, the opposite of a barn in Marfa, Texas. An clever little bit of hanging positioned the latter subsequent to a 3rd work from the identical 12 months, a scene in Brooklyn, Alabama Ave. Cease on the J Line, 2. The rhyme of the arching girders supporting the elevated tracks with the equally curving roof beams of the barn serves as a reminder that this artist doesn’t see out of doors and indoor area so otherwise—actually, partially by the best way he lets the decrease portion of the barn inside fade into mere wisps of graphite traces in order that the partitions lack definition, the barn appears as capacious as the nice outdoor, regardless of its occurring in considered one of Downes’s uncommon vertical works.

Additionally within the present have been twenty-two drawings dated 2020. They’re all smaller than the sooner items, and so they all depict the identical place: Downes’s studio in Manhattan. Seeing them, I at first questioned why he ever maintained a studio, on condition that his work and drawings had beforehand all been made elsewhere. However regardless of. It’s fortunate that, when the Covid lockdowns got here alongside, he had a roomy place to retreat to and far to take a look at. When one notices {that a} recurring presence within the latest drawings is a walker, one realizes that, for this artist in his eighties, the pandemic was not the one limitation on his mobility.

But in no sense does one really feel that confinement to the studio represented a diminishment of scope for Downes. Removed from it. The world inside these partitions is as huge as Texas, as large because the lordly Hudson, containing all of the area crucial for Downes’s artwork. Like these facet panels within the 1996 rendering of the sewage-treatment plant, the brand new drawings depend on a softer mark than is typical of his massive panorama drawings. Compared with the sooner work, these possess a barely blurrier or mistier high quality. But inside their smaller compass, they’re simply as fastidiously noticed, although the artist’s attentiveness is much less evenly distributed: The blurring-out of the picture towards the underside of the web page in a number of of the drawings (e.g., Within the Artist’s Studio II, V, and VIII) conveys a way that area has change into more durable to measure. The place does the observer stand? In others, the place chairs or easels occupy the foreground (Within the Artist’s Studio XVI or XIX), one’s personal place feels extra securely anchored. But even when the paraphernalia of life and artwork appear most unsure of entry, the very sight of them affords consolation.

These studio drawings are suffused with a really completely different feeling-tone from that of the landscapes: one that’s extra loving, extra imbued with gratitude. Going out to watch the scene within the Meadowlands a long time earlier, Downes had declared, “I regarded, and didn’t consider issues nearly as good or unhealthy, however as current.” Properly! Even God, as I recall from Genesis, was ready to search out that what he noticed was good. Perhaps Downes considers such judgment a divine perquisite. However to me, the world of Downes’s latest drawings seems like a world of excellent. And it doesn’t swerve previous in a whoosh that the attention can comply with with admiration; it comes shut, presents itself to the hand, exudes heat, extends a reassuring embrace.

Barry Schwabsky is a coeditor of worldwide opinions for Artforum. His latest books embrace Gillian Carnegie (Lund Humphries, 2020) and a set of poetry, Emotions of And (Black Sq. Editions, 2022).