In every lyrical Julia Rooney painting on display at the Band of Vices gallery in West Adams, there loomed an insidious geometry. It wasn’t enough for the talented Rooney to make beautiful paintings. No, her solo show there, BLUEPRINT, had to delve so subtly yet succinctly into the current visual moment across culture that she marked where art is at exactly this moment along the arc of history.
As the exhibition’s title evinces, BLUEPRINT is not a show dominated by red and yellow. With a blue pallet the artist reveals fascinating truths about what looking looks like. As the proverbial old wiseman observed, many people look but few really see. Every painter, fundamentally, looks but of any panter working today, Rooney sees.
We are in a moment that history may blink over. There was three dimensional space. Then there was cyberspace. The flattest screens gave us the deepest worlds and the internet upon which everyday tasks were mandated. The three dimensional space of a million years of human history was replicated with depth where there was no depth. At some point, a few years or many years from now, this will all be different. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
It is this space that Julia Rooney captures so deftly, this impossibly flat possessor of optical depth. Modernist painting eschewed the scientific linear perspective that dominated the medium since the days of Masaccio. There were, however, always outliers who found ways to make pictorial space innovative and layered. Rooney is in exquisite company here. She abstracts our decade’s visual planes, the layers we encounter online everyday, with the same aplomb that Richard Diebenkorn painted the space between his porch and the sea in his Ocean Park series. A painterly touch that wastes not a brushstroke is the calling card of these two artists separated at birth by a mere 67 years.
But she is not satisfied with the ethereal flatness that dazzled the midcentury. The online world in which we live is dominated by digital simulations of dimension which she solidifies in mature meditations on the role of illusionistic space in our century. Her rendering of depth is precise. The sharp relief of punctured planes lets us marvel at her technical skill. The pure abstraction of layered planes avoids the cloying tropes artists use to reveal a mastery of the third dimension. The only artist with a similar sophistication that came to mind here was the great Al Held — and Rooney is operating on a level of lush experiential process far beyond the former’s geometric world.
The installation at Band of Vices alternated smaller gems on canvas with larger “museum-wall” paintings. This purposefully forced viewers to move closer and pull back, using our bodies as a zoom-in, zoom-out tool as we walked around the welcoming large space. The last time I personally had visited BOV was for the solo show of Sharon Barnes, another great abstract painter. Hard to recall seeing two world-class abstract painter solo shows in a row (albeit separated by more than a year) at the same gallery. What an inspiration for us all to get offline for an afternoon and venture forth to look at painting immortalize the look, feel and depth of our perpetually online era.
The exhibit runs thru Saturday, January 13, 2024.