November 30, 2000 - January 13, 2001

John Cage / Rudolf de Crignis

"Works on Paper"

Margarete Roeder Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper by John Cage and Rudolf de Crignis from November 30, 2000 through January 13, 2001. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, November 30, from 6- 8 PM. The exhibition will consist of a group of paintings on paper from 1991 by de Crignis together with a selection of more recent pencil on paper works; Cage will be represented by a group of "Where R=Ryoanji" drawings. Cage began his Where R=Ryoanji drawings in 1982 and continued to make them until his death in 1992. The drawings are all executed on Japanese paper and were entirely determined by chance operation. Using a sequence of computer-generated random numbers Cage would draw around each of fifteen stones (the same number found in the Ryoanji gardens in Kyoto); the stone, its placement on the paper, and the pencil used all being determined by chance. The titles, such as 5R/10, indicate that he drew five times (R meaning Ryoanji) around the fifteen stones with 10 different pencils. The strict methodology of Cage's practice did not preclude his personal intervention, rather he chose the questions and employed chance to provide the answers. As he once remarked he invoked chance in his works as, "It allows me to draw a line without embarrassment." De Crignis will show a group of tempera on paper paintings from 1991. These works are made-one is tempted to say constructed-by painting several layers of one or more colors (such as red or green) and black. The almost imperceptible grid is the trace of both the wide brush used to paint, wet-in-wet, the tempera, and also of the vigorous gesture, the dynamic of their realization. The process of painting is intently foregrounded, as is the acute sense of color, the contrasts between the colors and the black. But there is something else at work here, a quality that actualizes an almost sculptural, rather than purely pictorial sensibility. In these works de Crignis imparts a material sensibility to the surface of the image: in this way the eye can enter within the works, and not merely graze the surface. In investigating the materiality of the surface and interstitial-infrastitial, even-spaces of the picture, de Crignis established a practice that he continues to the present. By contrast with the presence of the "black" paintings the pencil on paper works display an almost impalpable lightness. Made by delicately inscribing pencil lines onto thin white card and then erasing them, the images are also constructed from accumulative layering. However, unlike the comparatively simple stratification in the paintings, the erasure permits only a slight trace to remain, presenting an evanescent, rather than a substantial, reification of de Crignis' concerns. For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery. TOP

©2000 MARGARETE ROEDER GALLERY