Christopher Wool

Museu de Serralves (Porto)
Christopher Wool

The heavy silence and emasculation that characterise the Serralves rooms has became diluted by Christopher Wool’s painting and silkscreen work. Reduced abstractions that unleash layers of sound, unheard music overcoming those sumptuous white spaces. There are street encounters along the route with particular note, beats, control, and rhythms. These paintings are translated into a withdrawal from reality and from personal interaction into desire and delusion, with a sense of fragmentation.

Through untitled silkscreen to untitled painting, an urban schizophrenia is translated into a pictorial context. The institutionalized interior space that delimits the museum from the urban area surrounding it is brought down by the inconsistent and contradictory elements demarking the 35 large-scale surfaces. As on an urban set, through streets and parks, from private places to public spaces and therein, we walk in erratic wet brush strokes and prearranged accidents, sinking in to the residual paint’s appearance and disappearance.

Painted symbols, most of them were made between 2006 and 2008 and a few conceived previously; some are manmade marks while others are more mechanical – enamel on linen or silkscreen ink on paper. Wool’s painting style depicts urban decay: he erases, replace and covers up in layers small areas on a surface with different lines, spots, stains and colours. Transforming what is generally accepted as the reality of a disciplined space into an idiosyncratic belief maintained by the work’s disorder.

A flow of strong, regular, disorderly repeated patterns of movement and arrangements, playing like notes on a white page or blank canvas. These large-scale vertical impositions become sensorial portals into different territories. Meanwhile, those discomforting deviations reverberate in individual uttered sounds experienced as recognizable, internally expressed opinions.

Moving on to a different set from the one he made with the painted phrases, his work still has a hardcore combination of defiance, intelligence and visual talent. Nevertheless, this anti-establishment is pitch-perfect for today’s market. Through these pictures Wool express something, then weaken it; he makes an argument then rejects it, while comprising the whole and then exploding the components.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 250_1 (183), Febrero_Marzo 2009 España © Christopher Wool, "Untitled", 2007, pintura sobre tela, 269,24x243,84cm.