Oh beautiful for kaleidoscopic skies and shimmering rainbows of grain…
The sublime is a disorienting quantum of space. A glimpse of infinite horizons that overwhelm, dwarf or more simply exceed the limits of human apprehension. In the Renaissance painters from Giorgione to Giovanni Baptista Tiepolo looked to clouds in the sky to spirit viewers up and away to the upper reaches of consciousness. In the Romantic era others looked to mountains – Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt among them - and stormy seas – John Martin and J.M.W. Turner being the masters of turbulent waters – to launch the public into dramatic spatial extremes while frightening them into a realization of their relative puniness compared to the vastness and violence of nature.
The American Sublime, of which Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran and Thomas Cole were preeminent exponents, provided stirring illustrations for the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and in the process created templates for or against which painters since them have rung any number of changes, one of them consisting of placing emblems of Americana in classic American landscapes. Thus emblems of our national experience – an Art Deco gas station for example or an eye-popping Miami beach style motel sign – take their place in Greg Drasler’s geometric rendering of the prairies.
The vehicle of choice for traversing the North American Continent has long since ceased to be a swift horse or plodding prairie schooner, and neither is it the second hand jalopy of the Kerouac era much less antique zephyrs or divine wings of Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods which returned as allegorical conveyances from the 18th into the 20th centuries. No, our ride is a late-model BMW, signaling the decline of Detroit’s hegemony over the automobile industry. Even in the US. Even for an artist raised in the Midwest, as Drasler was. Specifically he was born in Waukegan, Illinois and educated at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. In short, The Heartland. Yet for all that his abstract landscapes evince the combined fecundity and vacancy of that region, Drasler is no regionalist – no latter day Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, or Grant Wood although like all three he has sought inspiration in pre-modern European masters. Rather he is a transcendentalist of a decidedly no-nonsense variety that lack of pretense being the hallmark and guarantor of his authenticity as product of is region of “the flyover” – which, with a stubbornness characteristic of modern art’s Wrong Way Corrigans, he has chosen to drive through.
This long detour into landscape has come late in the career of an artist who was previously known primarily as a painter of still lives and interiors. Often those subjects were keyed to deliberate anachronisms of detail and design, such as the Art Deco gas station cited above. However, there is no nostalgia in these most recent canvases, and not all that much in earlier pictures compared to those of that other fastidious “recuperator,” Duncan Hannah, for whom not only was time suspended in his imagery, but it had stopped entirely, opening an imaginative parenthesis which Hannah filled with longing. Presumably working from vintage photos as did Hannah, Drasler has depicted once fashionable bedroom sets and lobbies along with steamer trunks out of the 20th century past of the sort that only first class passengers on ocean liners would pack for an extended voyage. Memento moris of the privileged past, they are, for those to whom such privileges are remote, if not exotic, invitations to dream.
On the other hand the simultaneously high, fractured yet fathomless skies in these more recent canvases are something else again. The only timeframe they belong to or evoke is the quite recent past. The spatial dynamics Drasler has deployed recall the huge, vaulting geometries that postwar New York School Hard Edge painter Al Held specialized in during the final third of his career. Conceived of in dialogue with the Italian old masters Held knew those conventions well from long exposure to and study of their work in Rome and Florence. His aim was to realize the equivalent of their tableaux in a wholly abstract idiom but render their perspectival armatures with muscular volumes and high color contrast worthy of “American-type painting” - critic Clement Greenberg’s chauvinist coinage - of the mid-twentieth century. Drasler’s approach is comparably expansive but chromatically and tonally subtler than Held’s. Thus out the window of his speeding car he “sees” tessellating lozenges of generally pastel hues mapping out the spaces above the horizon while below it other similar units of oblique grids chart the ground as it passes by him. Nothing within his field of vision – except for the vehicle he is traveling in, and of that only fragments of the windshield and side windows – is realistically portrayed, yet everything falls into place in a Gestalt of highway vistas we can readily read and assimilate, vindicating the perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim’s contention that the mind completes with stored memories and deeply etched mental templates the images that we experience only in bit and pieces. Or, following Willem de Kooning’s terminology for drive-by views, “slipping glimpses.”
This capacity, in turn, allows Drasler to play conceptual/perceptual games with the standard elements of his compositions. For example, as the son of an architect familiar with that discipline’s foam core model-making, he integrates architectural volumes of modernist buildings never actually built into his landscapes. Accordingly, in Chain and Dealership (both 2020) boxy constructions that simultaneously recall Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 and Malvina Reynolds satirical song about the proliferation of Levittown-type housing in the 1950s, hover above the ground plane whilst curving upright parentheses derived from the moldings on the ceilings of Italian palazzos decorated by Tiepolo crop the shifting isometric units of the sky above. Of course, all of this is the product of overlaid patterns that stand in for, but do not represent clouds, plowed fields, rest stops and farmsteads. Again the mind’s eye rationalizes and unifies what might otherwise appear as arbitrary facets offered by the artist.
With an additional shuffling of his deck of abstract cards, Drasler folds the relatively shallow space of the pictures just described, as well as other wider panoramas of recent date into closed ones akin to the gutter where pages meet in an open book. These canvases result from the running together or abutting of rectilinear abstractions that in effect conjure verticals out of horizontals, depth out of flatness. The impact of such formal prestidigitation is liberating. As is anything that successfully breaks ingrained visual habits. It pops the locks that pin imagery down and makes the world new again, even as it revives and refreshes old technologies of depiction and gives new purpose to sleight of hand elisions. Drasler is a magician at the height of his pictorial powers. It is impossible not to enjoy his performance and admire his craft, absent churlish adherence to modernist dogma, that is. But then who wants that at this late stage of the game, for hasn’t modern art been a game from the start?!
Robert Storr Brooklyn 2023
[1176 – words]
Road Trip Exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery
15 Rivington St. New York, New York
June 16 through August 5th
