BOB RAUSCHENBERG GALLERY AT EDISON STATE COLLEGE
Fort Myers, Florida March 13th, 2009 6–8 pm
Gallery Talk by Mike Solomon at 7 pm
The exhibition is the first survey of paintings that focuses
exclusively on Solomon’s career long involvement with the color black.
30 works have been selected from the Estate’s Collection dating from 1945 through 1989.
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College
8099 College Parkway, Fort Myers Tel: 239 489 9313 or 9314
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 4pm Saturday 11am – 3pm
Closed Sundays and holidays The exhibition runs through April 9th
www.bobrauschenberggallery.com
SYD SOLOMON : ON BLACK
“Color is traditionally the language of emotion. Syd Solomon is a colorist, heir to the American tradition, intuitive, free and passionately ‘embosomed in Nature’ to use Emerson’s phrase.”
- Kenneth Donahue, Director of LACMA 1966
Though the use of the color black has been an important element of Syd Solomon’s work since the beginning of his career, there has never been an exhibition devoted exclusively to his use of the color. The paintings herein represent some of his most complex works in which black plays a crucial roll. For an artist whose formal interests had to do with layers of colors that are punctuated by gesture, black served as the ultimate context from which all other “lights” emerge.
Solomon once mentioned the effect that George Roualt’s work had on him when he first encountered it during his studies at L’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1945. He said that he was taken by Roualt’s use of black, the heavy lines that often delineate the imagery, because they structured the compositions through their rhythms. Solomon followed suit in several studies done in Paris in 1945.
By the late 1950s, Solomon had met Franz Kline among other Abstract Expressionists in New York. The two men had much in common, as both were born around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, seven years apart. Both had played football and come from rough beginnings. Solomon visited Kline’s studio on several occasions and was influenced by Kline’s black brushstroke paintings. The scale of Solomon’s marks increases during this time, as is seen in his use of gelatin rollers that made large gestural pathways across his canvases and works on paper from early 1960s. Black, dark blue or dark brown predominated in his roller works and it was his work from this period that were collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Wadsworth Athenaeum and Whitney Museum, among others.
Solomon’s experimental use of water-based polymers, the precursors to acrylic paint, led him to develop a unique understanding of layering, which manifested itself in his invention of a resist technique using spray paints and masking paste on colored canvas grounds. Solomon’s technique had a precedent in the watercolor tradition, in which oral atomizers are used to spray wet colors over existing dried colors saved in certain areas by wax. Solomon was able to make a much larger version of the resist effect using his technique on large canvases. Although Solomon used many colors for grounds to receive his spray applications, it is certainly black which absorbs all other colors so absolutely. Most of the paintings in this exhibition were started on black grounds.
Most tellingly, is the lithograph Shore Sentry that the artist created in 1977. Using a dense black German etching paper, the black sheet itself becomes the field for the other colors of the print. Shore Sentry leaves no doubt how important a role black played for Solomon as environs for all other color. In all the works selected for this exhibition, Solomon used the weight of black to set up compositional rhythms and its absorption of light, to show off color, of which he was certainly, a master.