The Reign of the Rain


'Alexis Rockman Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman has reconciled with postmodernism. In past exhibitions, except for a dystopian series done in 1900 that centered on environmental hazards and the grotesque mutations engineered by gene-splicing techniques, Rockmart's work never quite significantly transgressed the modern pedagogy of both natural and art history. Instead, his finesse as a painter dazzled us with its abozzo-and-glazing techniques which reflect light in a manner unseen - with the exception of Ross Bleckner's work - for several decades. In short, Rockmart's production always seemed to be an anachronism; but was it an anachronism by being retrograde or by being ahead of the dominant production of the times?

As in modern physics, such a question is wholly relative to one's position. In the twenty-eight-foot painting, Evolution, which ambitiously represents every paleontological age hypothesized by science with a selection of its zoological denizens alongside hybrid beasts of his own design, Rockman becomes something more than a postmodern naturalist Hieronymus Bosch. He charts the human condition, not by including humans in his depicted "history" of evolution, but by imploying our place with our gaze, a gaze that encompasses all time (psychologically speaking) and is arguably constructed not in a "nature" apart from humanity, but in the nature that resides as a paradigm in the minds of humans.

Rockmart has finally shown a critical side of his work that goes beyond the political and environmental implications of his earlier work, demonstrating that even the intellectual faculty required to frame history and the tendency to criticize its events is a mutation (some might say sublimation) of the imperative to survive, something Rockmart is doing superbly.

G. Roger Denson
aus: FLASH ART Jan/Feb 1993

Thanks to Jay Gorney Modern Art, NYC