dayoutlast: November 2021

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Sunday, November 7, 2021

Julia Rommel "Long Leash" @ Overduin & Co

Someone's Daughter, 2020
oil on linen
81 3/4 x 72 1/4 inches

Postman, 2020
oil on linen
18 3/4 x 16 1/4 inches

Left:

Untitled (LA 2/27/2020), 2020

colored pencil, wax crayon, and oil pastel on vellum

16 1/2 x 10 3/4 inches

Right:

Untitled (Verdugo 4/7/2020), 2020

colored pencil, wax crayon, and oil pastel on vellum

16 3/4 x 11 inches

Untitled (Verdugo 4/7/2020), 2020

colored pencil, wax crayon, and oil pastel on vellum

16 3/4 x 11 inches

Sneaks, 2020

oil on linen

20 x 17 inches

Four Dogs, 2020

oil on linen

82 x 74 inches

Killer Cut, 2020

oil on linen

50 x 48 inches

Doug's Van, 2020

oil on linen

Private Drive, 2020

oil on linen

77 1/2 x 105 inches

Julia Rommel "Long Leash" @ Overduin & Co

When I saw these paintings, I immediately went, in my mind, to Richard Diebenkorn, particularly the Ocean Park series, the series for which he is most well known; of course, there are others paintings of his worth considering, especially as they investigate the relationship between structure and color, to be general and crude. But they are far from that, just as Rommel's paintings here are far from that even though they do seem to embrace mis-registration, misalignment, frayed edges, all phrases, like the paintings themselves that could easily be misconstrued as negatives but are rather quite amazing and deft in the way they approach coherence without actually doing so; in fact, they also work very well as metaphors for internal states of being, certainly interior space(s). In which case, I'm still inside my head viewing, reveling in layers and intersections whether they be linear or spatial yet not dimensional.

Revel and revery may be better words for me than "long leash" as the title of the show suggests. In fact, I'm not quite sure what I would be tied to. There are no concrete referents to attach save titling, in Rommel's instance. In fact, on that note, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series is much less about locating facts in the landscape than it does a state of mind about the place he's in. From what I can gather from the press release about transitional life and working for Rommel, it seems fitting then, that her paintings may also reflect a state of mind, though they refer less to a place than they do people and objects in time, perhaps tethers all. Hence, long leash? Whatever the case, the language that supports these paintings are secondary to the immediate, viewing experience, which, eventually, led me home to pull my only Diebenkorn book from the shelf to want to know more, about the connections, and about why I still think about his work and also Julia Rommel's.