Jeffrey Dennis
Artist
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Jeffrey Dennis; Art Space Gallery
by Barry Schwabsky Artforum Vol XLII No. 2 October
2003 ISSN 0004-3532 (p 184)
Art is most likely to touch on something real just at the
point where it doesn't look like other art, and Jeffrey
Dennis's keeps looking less and less like anybody's but
his own. In the past, Dennis has attached
three-dimensional objects to his paintings or simply done
the paintings on three-dimensional objects; situated them
on the floor as well as on the wall; and done them on
canvases shaped like TV screens or on seemingly irrational
sequences of abutted rectangles that meander aimlessly
across a wall. Here he sticks to the conventional
wall-hung rectangle as well as to a single kind of ground:
a dense field of roughly drawn, overlapping circles, which
can at times resemble pebbles, at other times bubbles. Yet
canny handling of color and composition allows the artist
to seemingly reinvent his formula each time.
Of course, Robert Rauschenberg and his "flatbed picture
plane," as Leo Steinberg described it, are the manifest
precedent for the way Dennis treats the surface of the
painting: as that across which various self-contained
pictorial elements can be moved at will or as a "work
surface" on which things can be placed both for immediate
or eventual use, to be studied but also forgotten and
half-buried under later accretions. But a Dennis painting
never feels like it's just recapitulating one of
Rauschenberg's gestures. For one thing, it always looks
quintessentially English, as a Rauschenberg looks
ineffably American. That difference lies not only in the
content of the imagery--the three inset vignettes in Funny
Bones (Death of a Comic), 2002, derive from a
Benny Hill comedy, and the narrow white van seen in The
Delivery, 2002, is a familiar sight on any
English city street--but in tone: Dennis's paintings are
as understated and wry as Rauschenberg's are brash and
literal. The most telling difference between the two
artists has to do with the sense of time in their work,
which may be accounted for less by their nationalities
than by the fact that one artist was born in 1925 and the
other in 1958. For Rauschenberg, what's important about
the mode of perception captured in his classic paintings
and combines is its newness, so everything is imbued with
a sense of simultaneous presence--even when he
incorporates an image from an old painting, it doesn't
seem to refer to the past. For an artist of Dennis's time,
the flatbed picture plane, though maintaining its
usefulness, must evoke a certain nostalgia--yet it's also
a primitive harbinger of the virtual space of computer
interfaces, which are directly pictured in The Late Shift 2001. The very form now harbors memories and anticipations.
Therefore Dennis's paintings contain not just multiple
spaces but also multiple tempos--passages in which time
seems infinitely drawn out and flushed with ennui, like an
irregular but uneventful surface seen in nearly
microscopic close-up; and other passages that seem to
strike the eye in a flash. You think you can lose yourself
in these paintings, but sooner or later they will pull you
up short.
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