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Art in America - February, 1997 Rick Prol at Andew Kreps - New York At 39, Rick Prol trails some legendary hot-content associations -- with the East Village, where he was a key figure in the mid-'80s, and with Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he served as an assistant (and, some allege, surrogate) in the last drugged-out days of that painter's life. What a surprise it was, then, to see Prol emerge in this show of 21 paintings and 6 drawings @all from 1995-96) as something of a cool formalist. To be sure, the cartoonish imagery remains. Chugging trains, wrecked cars, sleeping hoboes, a gallowslike structure with hanging hooks or buckets, disembodied heads (one with a knife through the cheek), a weeping pumpkin, bicycles, a scarecrow topped by a human skull -- all these and more are rendered in Prol's signature dumb-drawing manner. The images do not cohere into a narrative but remain either isolate or, when multiple, sparsely scattered about the picture plane as a metaphor for fragmentation. In one work, a stack of inscribed phrases sets the tone" "Tired, tired/ Anxious/Angry/ Frustrated . . ." Private significations seem to abound, but only the general tenor -- that of irreverent angst -- is available to the viewer. Though the images emulate the psychic directness of work by children or the mentally disturbed, they are in fact highly mediated by conscious choice and artistic facility. Their primary message is the hipness of their creator. But the vehicle Prol has constructed for that meaning is now highly estheticized -- in an off-hand, self-denying way. Most of the images are done in ink on scraps of white paper. To assemble the paintings, Prol pastes the sheets in overlapping fashion on found boards of irregular shape, and slathers the whole in layers of gesso so that the outlined forms attain varying degrees of ghostliness. in each of the drawings, the paper consists of one yellowing page from a book on stress; a single image is centered on a field of gesso.) Consequently the viewing experience has become one in which the densities of surface, the knobbiness of edges and the hazy recession of images count for as much as -- or perhaps more than -- the nihilistic insouciance of the cartoons. Prol's images may still convey comic despair, but his well-wrought facture and the deftness of his draftsmanship, with its post-Pop concision and liveliness of line, bespeak an irrepressible respect for craft. |
