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Robert Long Salomon Contemporary, East Hampton 2006 Catalog
Like A Shark - Mike Solomon
Mature artists rarely leave traces of their influences. You can’t point to exact passages of Ingres or Mondrian in de Kooning paintings although you can sense that those painters inhabited him from time to time, the way aliens lived inside Sigourney Weaver. If you scratch an artist with a fully developed style you will not find a particular chapter from Janson but you might discover a whistle, sixth-grade report cards, an Allman Brothers eight-track tape, crumpled grocery lists. “Like the shark, it contains a shoe,” as Louis Simpson wrote of “American Poetry.”
Mike Solomon’s new paintings and big fiberglass sculpture are powerful not only because they make surprising and clear connections to the natural world but also because Solomon underplays his own unconventionality, something that many artists are unable or unwilling to do, and he has worked his way beyond his models. In this regard I am reminded of two artists I know that Solomon admires, and who, I suspect, exerted some influence on him when he was developing his own way of working.
John Chamberlain is the Rodin of scrap metal, and Dan Flavin was the Barnett Newman of fluorescent tubes, but the impact of their work can sometimes be deflated by its satirical element and by their desire to be viewed as rebels, innovators, bad-boy geniuses. Chamberlain mostly gets away with it because his work has great humor, but Flavin did his best to undermine the freshness of his installations by burdening them with pretentious titles and ponderous documentation. Solomon, on the other hand, thinks things through but doesn’t make a point of it. Because he tends toward understatement in his work, its complexity sneaks up on you.
The fiberglass sculpture and the new paintings in this show are seductive, deceptively simple-looking contraptions that seem to be made of light even while they refer most obviously to water. The sculpture resembles a cresting wave but it is the light inside that collapsing wall of water that is the real subject. You are drawn to stand inside the wave not only because it is womblike but also because it contains light you can’t otherwise experience for more than a few moments. Filtered through seven layers of fiberglass, it is mysteriously familiar and evocative.
Blisters and bubbles in the fiberglass suggest frozen sea foam. The literal web of dark netting that appears to hold the wave in place is actually a way of drawing in the fiberglass. A distorted grid, it suggests here not only a fisherman’s seine but also the skeletal drawing of a computer model, a map of the wave’s surface.
The new paintings are more than the sum of their parts. Solomon has painted outlines of corpuscle-like shapes, like melted chain-link fence, in beeswax on muslin, and then attached the muslin, like a filter, to a canvas on which he has dripped and poured acrylic paint. Only the colors of the paint were determined ahead of time; the image itself is arbitrary. The painting can be seen partially, and vaguely, through its muslin mask; some portions are clearer than others because the web of beeswax is nearly transparent. Looking at the pictures therefore becomes an either/or exercise, and it is while you are thus distracted, shifting your focus from foreground to background, that you see the light.
Only rarely does this light appear on canvas – it happens in Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Jane Wilson, and, of course de Kooning – and it can only be represented indirectly. Solomon, however, is of a different generation and temperament, and the materials he uses allow him to treat light more directly. What he has accomplished in these paintings is more on the level of magic than mimicry. He shows us something familiar about the world in a way we had not anticipated, and transcendence arrives in that moment of surprised recognition.
Pelican Press Mark Ormand 4.12.06
Mike Solomon’s view of Sarasota
Man-made changes in the landscape of Sarasota have been an issue since the Calusa Indians created settlements off Sarasota Bay. Mike Solomon, who now lives in East Hampton, is showing a body of work he calls “Sarasota Elegies” at Greene Contemporary on Pineapple. They are based on work he made in response to changes he saw here in 1982, when he lived on Siesta Key.
The work from the ‘80s was made with picture postcards scenes of beaches and sites in Sarasota he marked with wax crayons. His 2006 work is substantially larger in scale and he has used the newest technology available and a sophisticated printing process to create works that are pigment ink on rag paper with UV varnish. The transformation in scale and materials has altered many aspects of the earlier work and indeed created objects that are profoundly different.
The “Elegies” have the power of paintings and in fact, from a distance appear to be paintings on panels. With close inspection even the trained eye is confounded by the texture of the surface. The camera that scanned the postcards from the ‘80s has enlarged the dot pattern of the original postcards and the areas that were covered with wax remain opaque. The surface has a grain and a richness that is more like a canvas.
In “Leggy” Solomon has turned horizontal postcards on their sides. Roads and tree trunks are subverted and provide the foundation for orange, magenta and blue crayon lines that are elegant and lyrical. In “Passageway” Solomon takes us on a trip where we feel like we are doing rollovers in a barnstormer traveling over the barrier islands. His colors of white foam, sea blues and greens, contrasted with orange, level off the vista to an abstract view that rivets us.
In “Causeway” he has used the same postcard three times with the middle one reversed. Each is slightly different in the line and gesture that floats across the surface. Stacked _one over the other they read as a coherent integrated formal composition that is solid _and balanced.
In “Sunset Scribble” we have to search for traces of the skyline of New York or the fronds _of palm trees. Solomon unites four postcards with the blue line of the crayon. In “Dance of the Sea Cows” we want to thread through the tangle of lines to find the freedom of the water beyond.
Through the transformative aspect of Solomon’s process to rethink his ideas from the ‘80s, he has managed to produce more profound statements that address the current disruption of the natural beauty of Sarasota to a denser and more opaque environment where we must work harder to see water and sky.
Robert Long The East Hampton Star 8.9.01
Surf’s Up / Glenn Horowitz Bookseller East Hampton
Mike Solomon / Richard Prince/ Ashley Bickerton / Michael Halsband
Mike Solomon is represented by gorgeous, softly painted watercolor studies of the ocean _in various weather conditions, each accompanied by a brief penciled meteorological report. He is also showing a series of modest-looking, tinted beeswax-on-hardware cloth- that is, steel mesh - sculptures that manage to convey, through some genius of the _artist’s, the texture and movement of the tube formed by a wave’s curl as it crests and begins to collapse.
The medium seems perfectly suited to the subject, beeswax mottles color, and so the tint of each of the “waves” seems true to the look of the water. And when the works are placed on light boxes, as three of them are, you see the same kind of shimmery, semitransparent light that waves have. And the steel mesh provides just the right suggestion of the harsh look that driven water takes on, the raggedness of the leading edge of a wave.
The pieces are effectively seen from any angle, and the perceptual push and pull - Is it wax or wire? Is it a wave? How can wax look so watery? – keeps you looking.
Back in the early 1970s, a nascent conceptualist might have produced just one of these works, but it would have been huge, nailed to a very long gallery wall. There’s no reason Solomon couldn’t do that- it would be amazing to see- but there’s a great deal to be _said for these compact works’ aura of harnessed power. You should see the show for _them alone.
Helen A. Harrison New York Times Sunday 11.7.99
Abstract Objects and Realistic People
With seductive translucency and sensuous textures, Mike Solomon’s wax drawings on muslin and paper suggest that one must look into the images rather that at them. Where the wax acts as a resist medium, blocking the surface from receiving any color but its own, it seems still liquid, creating a floating window in the paper or cloth. Thus the isolated forms drawn in wax not only hover in undifferentiated space, but also alternate between assertiveness and recessiveness, so one cannot be sure if they are floating or sinking.
Most of the images represent hats, which have a longstanding role as symbols and surrogates of their wearers. “The hat makes the man,” as one old advertising slogan has it, and the Surrealists picked up on that truism to twit the bourgeoisie. Mr. Solomon’s intent is far more sympathetic, imagining van Gogh’s straw sun hat as a kind of halo, Chaplin’s bowler as a vessel for the fertile imagination, and his own father’s Army helmet as a camouflaged shelter – an especially apt metaphor, layered with multiple meanings that are both deeply personal and richly evocative.
William Zimmer The New York Times 6.6.99
Wax as a Medium and a Message
Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art In America: Montclair Art Museum
One of the simpler but most exemplary works is Mike Solomon’s drawing of an ear of Indian Corn made with beeswax obtained directly from a bee keeper with remnants of bee carcass still in it, it reinforces the connection to nature.
Phyllis Braff The New York Times 11. 7, 1993
Guild Hall Displays Work of its Neighbors in “Young Blood”
Mr. Solomon uses the tactile sensuousness of beeswax to create a varied surface that looks abraded, burnt and scarred, thus introducing a certain physical and psychological weight to what is usually a single image. A black-on-black suggestion of a boat form in “Slip” involves shifting perceptions and demonstrates how the process of transformation can become the subject in the artist’s more successful pieces.
Rose C.S. Slivka The East Hampton Star 5.27.93
From the Studio
In a new series titled “Circa paintings”, Mr. Solomon portrays old tools and objects using unbleached, natural fluid beeswax, with and without pigment. He works speedily, brushing and spilling the amber-colored molten mix, since it dries on impact with the paper.
The total effect is fresh, and just awkward enough to convey a sense of authenticity, as if the artist were still in the flush of discovery, without full control as yet over his medium.
The material has such a character of its own that one feels the artist is doing his best to do its bidding. On the other hand, once the material understands what the artist is trying to do it will cooperate.
Drawn and Sculptured
The confrontational “Cigar”, for example, a round, brownish shape of wax, is both painted and stroked, in tones of red, brown, gray, and touches of green, with subtle drops and smears. Three holes burned through the ground of clear amber bees wax give another edge and another action, along with the splotches and drips of wax and color.
“Filter” looks as though the wax may have been dripped through a gridded sieve, making soft, plopped patterns. All 19 simple objects on view- a mouth harp, a honeycomb, a corncob, and the like- are made the same way, of unbleached beeswax, ink and gouache on handmade Avergne paper.
In his reach for a medium and method that would embrace the techniques of Abstract Expressionist painting, the directness and freshness of drawing and the substantial presence of sculptural material, Mr. Solomon has once again produced a new and engaging series of works.
Robert Long The Southampton Press 6.22.92
Perspectives
Mike Solomon’s “Re: Source” the overall title for a group of 14 works on view, is an experiment in the use of the somewhat unconventional medium of plasticene. Mr. Solomon incises simple images into the plasticene, which is a clay, wax and oil based material used for three dimensional modeling, and which usually has a grayish tint in its natural state. Plasticene is forever malleable, so the works on the Benton walls are, in a sense still “alive.”
Thus there’s something conceptual about the works: how permanent are they? How long are they intended to last in their present forms? One thinks back to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or all of the “Earthworks “ of the Sixties and Seventies. Like many of those works, Mike Solomon’s art works don’t “represent” nature: they “are” a piece of nature. The resource- the medium- is not only the source of inspiration: it is with numerous subtle adjustments (and herein lies what we traditionally call the “art”), the end product. The presence of these works which average roughly two feet square, is paradoxical.