Tim Rollins + KOS at Baumgartner - Brief Article

Since 1982, Tim Rollins has been making art in collaboration with KOS (Kids of Survival), the South Bronx-based arts collective that he founded. Adhering for the most part to a consistent strategy, in which, canonical works of literature function as both the conceptual and physical underpinnings of the work, Rollins and his shifting roster of pupil-collaborators produce formally sophisticated paintings that challenge traditional notions of the boundaries between "insider" and "outsider" art.

In their recent show at Baumgartner, five paintings were on view. The show's centerpiece, Macbeth (after William Shakespeare), consists of 25 8-by-11-inch book pages, comprising the full text of the play, hung discretely in a horizontal row. The pages are splattered with a dark brown pigment that looked like, and in fact is, dried blood. The amount of blood on each page increases gradually from left to right, recapitulating the mounting violence of the play.

Other paintings drew similar analogies between textual and visual elements. Paradiso--Canto I is a 44-inch-square canvas to which pages from Dante's Paradiso have been affixed in neat rows. Nine concentric circles of pale pink acrylic were applied on top of the pages, in a sort of Op-art allusion to Dante's nine circles of heaven.

Like Macbeth (after William Shakespeare), Winterreise/ Wasserfluth is composed of multiple pages from a single text: in this case, 12 pages from the score of Schubert's song cycle Winterreise. Each page is covered in a translucent layer of white acrylic and mica that partially obscures the text, which is printed in an old-fashioned Gothic font. With its spectral white-on-whiteness, Winterreise/ Wasserfluth manages to allude to snow globes and other species of Teutonic kitsch while convincingly echoing the Romantic melancholy of Schubert's music.

Two of the paintings, companion pieces titled The Essential No. 1 and The Essential No. 2, look to pop culture rather than to high culture for source material. The Essential No. 1 is a large (59-by-72-inch) canvas to which pages from 1970s Marvel comic books have been pasted in rows, as in Paradiso-Canto I. A thick layer of black matte acrylic covers the surface of the painting, but a scattered selection of dialogue balloons has been left meticulously free of paint, so that the immediate visual impression is of a black field dotted with white ovoid shapes. The raised edges of the comic-book pages assert themselves through the paint and form a grid that flattens the pictorial space. This two-dimensionality seems to invite viewers to ruminate over the text in the dialogue balloons, which, in typical comic-book style, is filled with italics and exclamation points (i.e., "I shall reduce you--to a random thought!"). Floating free of context, these cryptic histrionics seem eerie and disturbing. The Essential No. 2 is the same as its partner in all respects, except that white acrylic has been used instead of black. Fresh, bold and playful, but with a sinister tinge, the Essential pieces recall the paintings of Yayoi Kusama. Like the rest of the works here, they deploy a minimal number of elements for maximum visual and conceptual punch.

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