Rackstraw Downes: Drawings

Abstract

Rackstraw Downes: Drawings Rackstraw Downes and Karen Wilkin Rackstraw Downes makes images of things most people ignore: the trestles that support highway overpasses and elevated subway lines, non-descript buildings, vast landscapes that appear, at least at first glance, to be featureless. He is fascinated by the complicated geometry of expedient, seemingly illogical urban structures that he encounters in New York, where he lives for about half of every year. But he is equally engaged by the flat, minimally inhabited landscape of the Texas border town, beside the Rio Grande, where he spends the rest of the year. He has made drawings and paintings of interiors whose space appears impossible to understand, as well as of outdoor constructions that defy rational analysis, so much so that it can seem as if the places he chose to study had been built according to the physical laws of an alternative universe, or at least, according to an alternative, non-Euclidian geometry. I’ve often thought of Downes’s virtuoso depictions of complex, utilitarian steel trestles and struts as the equivalents of Renaissance drawings of the basket-weave support for men’s headgear known as a mazzocchio. The geometry of these openwork rings was so complicated that rendering them was a demonstration of the artist’s skill. Downes often seems to be standing in the middle of a kind of giant metal mazzocchio and testing himself against its challenges. But one generalizes about Downes at one’s peril. Recently, as if by contrast to his images of exteriors, he has done a series works of the interior of the barebones, rectangular sky-lit space where he lives and works. None of these unlikely subjects is accorded more or less importance than any other. It’s as if anything that has been seen and that compelled the artist’s [End Page 571] attention, whether because of its complexity or because of its blankness, is deemed worthy subject matter for art. To say that Downes makes images that are faithful to his vision is both accurate and not quite the full story. He’s certainly not the only painter, even in recent years, who strives to discover or invent two-dimensional equivalents for his awareness of the space and mass of the world we inhabit. But Downes is extremely unusual—perhaps unique—in his determined fidelity to the immediacy of his perceptions. He is so dedicated to the specifics of how he sees his subject matter that he will work on a painting only at the time of day, at the time of year, and in the kind of weather that insures the continuity of the quality and angle of light that first captured his attention. Some works take years to complete because of the need to wait for the return of a particular type of light. Yet the apparently faithful, accurate realism of Downes’s drawings and paintings notwithstanding, they become both more absorbing and more disconcerting the longer we spend with them. I suspect this is because we begin, perhaps subliminally, to recapitulate Downes’s own slow, meticulous, essentially disjunctive process of looking and recording, looking and recording, and of what he calls “turning the head in empirical space.” His drawings and the paintings that derive from them are not organized according to any mathematical system, such as linear perspective, but are the result of pure empirical experience. Downes is so attached to each fragment of his motif that he focuses on, sequentially, as he turns his head to survey what is around him, that the horizon line of his Texas images often curves and the space of the urban infrastructure seems to wrap itself around us. We feel that we are seeing things we’ve never seen before. Structures and places that we would ordinarily ignore become uncanny, at once familiar and charged with new, previously unsuspected meaning. Downes is as fine and perceptive a writer as he is a painter and draftsman. In What Realism Means to Me, a talk delivered at a symposium [End Page 572] on realism at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1981, and later published, he noted the pleasure we feel when Shakespeare...