PRESS RELEASE
KAY
ROSEN
Art
: Concept, September 10 - October 26, 1996 (Nice,
France)
UNLIMITED
Contemporary Art, September 16 - November 23,
1996 (Athens, Greece)
In
Kay Rosen’s paintings, words play while standing in place, making her
scrupulously legible imagery move past its simple, concrete demonstrations of
readability into tactfully performative positions that are as riveting as they
are riveted.
The
visual stability of her canvases is not upset even when a momentarily fixed
meaning of a depicted word or phrase disappears, suddenly to be replaced by a
new, seemingly at times unrelated connotation : it can be seen as a hybrid
word-as-picture counterpart to the psychologically loaded double-image (like
the duck/rabbit optical game cited by Wittgenstein and painted by Johns) in
which a form refuses to have only one interpretation, remaining inconstant
within the rigidity of its structure and shape.Probably no other artist today
is more clearly demonstrating the sophisticated visual capabilities of the
formally standardized, yet stylistically flexible letter-forms that help most
of us convey our ideas to others; moreover, Rosen repeatedly proves herself to
be so adept at making puns in her pictures that one wonders how she manages to
construct façades that more than handle the sheer overloading of
multiple interpretations instigated by her messages, without killing the
messenger.
These
paintings weather the threat of the signs they display, signs composed of words
that have been put in the funny yet canny position ( by either a writer or a
reader ) of saying one thing (or another) and meaning another (or an other
another), and vice versa, without losing their visual impact, conceptual wit,
or respect for significance and its communal value.
Terry
S. Myers
From
the text Kay Rosen in Arts, April 1992, page 75.
