Galleries: Robert Colescott comes of age, in living color

 BY KENNETH BAKER

Oakland native Robert Colescott, who left the Bay Area for Arizona in 1985, has returned in force with a sampling of a decade’s work at Meridian.

Robert Colescott's "Tastess Lik Chickens," (2001), acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

Colescott’s late paintings challenge viewers – especially those who do not know his earlier work – to recognize their artistic maturity.

Consider the big canvas “Tastess Lik Chickens” (2001).

I see it as a re-staging of the Fall of Man, as only Colescott would do it.

Note the inventory of elements: an amorous couple at the center, beneath a tumescent heart struck by an arrow, a cascade of hamburgers – symbolizing the beguilements of sins to come? – from which issues a serpent, snaking its way up to form the mustache of a voyeuristic God-the-Father, an embedded Colescott self-portrait. The picture includes a rising sun in one quadrant and a light bulb in another, symbols of post- and prelapsarian states.

The loving couple has a curious echo in a crescent and star – Colescott paints them more like a banana and starfish – a symbol long associated with Islam that redirects the viewer’s attention to the painting’s date. Perhaps that passage and the tatters of red and white at the top of the picture refer to the national loss of innocence that America supposedly experienced on Sept. 11, 2001.

Like many of Colescott’s paintings, this one incorporates autobiographical references, no doubt many more than we can recognize, such as the Pyramids that evoke his pivotal 1960s sojourn in Egypt, plus allusions to other artists, including Henri Matisse and Philip Guston. The allusions occur at the levels of color, drawing and imagery.

Like Matisse, Guston, Willem de Kooning, R. B. Kitaj and others, Colescott has evolved

"Boxer-etta" (2002), acrylic on paper, also by Colescott. Photo courtesy of Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

a personal drawing style so eccentric and fluid that it must surprise him as often as it does viewers of his work. It seems to muse on itself as it notates the artist’s thoughts and reactions to things. Often Colescott’s drawing gives a whole pictorial field a tropism like that of handwriting. It writhes as if with involuntary recall of the effort to break free of verisimilitude, which many modern artists have experienced as a kind of tyranny.

The cartoonish, child-like look of Colescott’s drawing must elicit the usual my-kid-could-do-better dismissals. But it has taken Colescott, now 82, decades to achieve the authoritative relaxation his recent work displays. Pieces such as “Ascension” (2003) and “W. M. D.: Remembering Sardanapalus” (2004/06) display a figurative abbreviation that makes them look unfinished at first. But linger with them awhile and you sense a map of feeling and purpose beneath their seemingly unconnected dots.

“W. M. D. …” remakes in nearly abstract terms Eugène Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827), while it makes an analogy between Saddam Hussein and the Assyrian king who ordained the destruction of all his treasures, material and human alike, just before his defeat.

The blood red field of “W. M. D…” evokes the human toll of America’s neo-colonial adventure in Iraq and alerts us to the fact that Colescott has learned to sublimate issues of race – the overt crux of so many earlier works – into color dissonances with no direct reference to skin tone. Thus, we can easily read the “original sin” in “Tastess Lik Chickens” as miscegenation even without his color-coding the lovers as he so often has. The unleashed palette itself communicates the thought, reinforced by the picture’s title. Colescott’s late work makes his brilliance as a colorist undeniably plain.

A large print here made at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press contains a key to Colescott’s work: two paint pots labeled respectively “race” and “sex.” There might have been a third labeled “art,” because all these fixations fused in his sensibility long ago. They emerge entwined in the knockout painting-on-paper homage to de Kooning and Picasso, “Boxer-etta” (2002).