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Press > Chris Ashley's essay for Kristi Engle Gallery's 2007 catalog:

Steven LaRose’s Otherworldliness

Well into Kevin Costner’s underrated film Waterworld, there is a moment when the camera views “the Mariner” about three-quarters from the rear and we catch a glimpse of a gill behind his ear. It’s an unexpected, even shocking moment—although it makes sense that a future water-covered earth resulting from melted polar ice caps would require the evolution of gills, it’s jarring because it’s an otherworldly way of being that exists “outside of or not in accordance with nature as we know it— nonnatural, preternatural, transcendental[1].” Because of his gills, the Mariner can dive to the remains of previous civilizations at the ocean’s bottom to retrieve objects or artifacts valued as treasure. Looking at Steven LaRose’s new paintings, I think of the Mariner’s gills, the kind of world he lives in, and his activities.

Context
Over the past year or so I have witnessed the development of LaRose’s current crop of paintings via virtual studio visits. Generally, he reports progress on his blog[2] with images and writing elaborated in discussion with a community of fairly regular visitors, while finished work is captured and sorted in Flickr [3]. Anyone can look, although clearly, seeing paintings on a monitor is no substitute for the actual thing. Still, peering over the artist’s shoulder, even edited and in pixels, is a privilege few people experienced in the past.

It has been fascinating to follow the ups and downs and back and forth from my ringside seat. Having watched LaRose’s (heroic) struggle with the many paths his work took until he wrangled them into a more focused, though certainly not myopic, direction, I think of how he has entwined several components into a combination that is integrated and strong. Three components in this recent work I want to discuss are subject matter (the otherworldly), material (the properties of colored liquid), and viewer experience (the sublime).

Otherworldly
From the first moment I finally relaxed enough to successfully snorkel I was immediately enthralled and terrified. I knew that I had entered a hostile and indifferent world in which I am a complete foreigner, but that I could carefully visit and observe. For years I have known: I am no Mariner. Floating face down on the surface of the ocean, one sees tremendous beauty, but in colder and deeper waters, particularly, the sights are almost monstrous and vaguely repelling, or compellingly otherworldly.

LaRose’s images ooze a sense of otherworldliness. His images depict some other form of life from an environment foreign to me. The scale is weird and indefinable, and we can’t really know how large something is: near or far, microscopic or gigantic? What kind of space is depicted: shallow or deep? Are two depicted objects supposedly different sizes or instead positioned closer to and further from the plane upon which they’re painted? Despite all of my looking I can’t know with certainty where I am in relation to the images, and, in fact, I don’t even know if I’m in the same world. I’m a visitor.

Numerous ambiguities let me look at these images in several ways. The two shapes in Beautiful Miasma might be ocean life, microbial life, or extraterrestrial life—are they parent and child, or prey and predator? 05-26-07-b is simultaneously a Jurassic Cyclops skull, a setting sun over a megalithic formation, and an egg or eyeball in a bell jar. 05-22-07-c is a snail and a cauliflower, a dendrite and a nebula, and antennae and an explosion. Is this nature or fabrication, history or fantasy, science or monstrosity? Although “outside of accordance with nature,” I take some consolation in knowing that it’s all simply paint on a flat surface, but only a little consolation—because everything I see is unnamable and uncertain I am filled with the inner struggle, even anxiety, of approach-avoidance, fascination and revulsion, and a deeply engaged ambivalence. And I like that, in a creepy, familiar sort of way.

Liquid
The story goes that God made a form and blew life into it, resulting in Adam. But that’s not necessarily a useful model for the artist: He made the form that He imagined to receive the life that He had planned for it, whereas the artist struggles to find a form into which he desperately hopes to be able to breathe some life. The former is perfectly conceptualized execution, while the latter is chaotic trial and error. The artist finds ways to realize form and life, though the route may be indirect and unexpected, delayed and unknown.

Many of LaRose’s recent images are made by blowing on the paint though a straw, or with a compressor or hairdryer; by pushing the paint with objects; and by tilting the horizontal support. The thought of blowing paint brings Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's The Soap Bubble, ca. 1734[4], to mind, but rather than blowing a perfect sphere, LaRose’s blown shapes resemble burst bubbles and splattered liquid. Yet I don't see accident and disorder; but instead composed images of colored liquid deliberately shepherded into complex layers of skittering lines and choreographed shapes like explosive floral fireworks.

Pushing colored liquid around a horizontal surface with a straw is a risky business for an adult attempting to make serious images. It’s related to Surrealist techniques: coulage, frottage, grattage, heatage [5]. It’s also a grade school thing, akin to scratching lines through black ink to uncover the brilliant waxy crayon field below. Is this a way of suppressing expected art skills, or developing new or unexpected skills? For LaRose, whose drawing and painting skills are extremely impressive, to blow paint is to avoid an expected dexterity of the hand, while employing other extremely sensitive parts of the painter’s body—mouth, tongue, throat, lungs—areas that are soft, delicate, vulnerable, hidden.

Sublime
Edmund Burke's idea of the beautiful and the sublime, published in 1757[6], is that the “Beautiful…is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us [7].” In Tracey Bashkoff’s excellent introduction to the catalog On the Sublime[8] she quotes Burke, noting that beauty is “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” and the sublime is founded on “whatever is qualified to cause terror.” She notes that in comparing sublimity and beauty, Burke concludes that “they are ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.” Bashkoff says, “Those things in nature that cause terror by their association with potential danger are sources of the sublime. But this danger may be at a distance or even staged, and therefore causes delight rather than pain. These things ‘are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror.’”

Delightful horror: floating on the ocean's surface, staring into the darkness and strange life below; the strangeness of the Mariner's gills, and the mystery of his deep dives and life on the vast ocean; the fascination, revulsion, charm, and uncanniness of LaRose's images. The otherworldly is the sublime.

LaRose’s large painting 100207 contains an ominously roiling, multi-chambered amoeba floating in the sky, tentacles hanging down, billowing clouds around it; I think of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hovering over the staged landing area, blasting its five ominous notes. In 061307B a spotted, cushiony anemone-like shape is buoyantly suspended, reminding me of the foreboding danger in Albert Bierstadt’s Storm in the Mountains[10], ca. 1870, a view of a lush green valley towards mountains over which churns a mass of rain clouds, forming an arched space under which we look into the distance. The weather hangs heavily, in constant motion and perhaps about to clear, but we can’t be certain, so there is caution. This is the sublime: something awesome yet threatening that we should avoid, but which fascinates us despite our strong sense of self-preservation.

Treasure
LaRose’s sense of the otherworldly, his exploitation of the inherent physical qualities of colored liquid, and the notion of the sublime in his art make for an integrated body of work. Despite the variety of images, he is operating under a singularly strong and coherent vision. He conjures a strange world out of paint, the movement of his body, and the swift sureness of his eye. While painted images are unavoidably flat, square, and composed, LaRose’s images are also deep, vast, and difficult to identify, shocking and surprising. He is the Mariner, diving down as far as he can, almost recklessly, to pull out treasures of strange shape and utility that have been submerged in a darkness too difficult to access through the form or language which we habitually use. His is a rich and serious undertaking.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
October 2007

[1] http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/OTHERWORLDLY
[2] http://stevenlarose.blogspot.com/
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/larose/
[4] http://www.metmuseum.org/special/chardin/soap.R.htm
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_technique
[6] http://tinyurl.com/3yo498
[7] Ibid.
[8] On the sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell. Bashkoff, Tracey. Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. 2001.
[9] Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Steven Spielberg. 1977
[10] http://tinyurl.com/3dwkjq