Robert Lazzarini: Drawings

Deitch Projects presented an exhibition of work by Robert Lazzarini which featured drawings on paper and canted panels as well as a two-part wall drawing. These new works built on Lazzarini’s existing vocabulary of compound planar and sine wave distortion with increased complexity. Incorporating convoluted structure and an insistent physicality, his work addressed phenomenology, spatial disorientation, perception, and new types of vision.

In the main gallery, a series of drawings on large wood panels were hung at oblique angles from the wall, heightening the viewer’s physical relationship to them and the surrounding space. A large wall mural was executed in two parts so that it laid both inside and outside of the gallery. Viewing the elements simultaneously visually collapsed the space between the two. In the front gallery, smaller drawings on paper presented a variety of manipulated forms in graphite, chalk and ink wash.

At times, the legibility of Lazzarini’s images was obscured, allowing only glimpses of the recognizable. Lines were layered, knotted, tangled, and even frenzied. Figures slip into and out of form, denying materiality. Conflating layered density and motion, these images resisted vision.

Although sculpture and drawing were separate endeavors for Lazzarini, the two reused, combined, and revisited common subjects. Skulls, guns, knives, and funerary statuary exemplifed a fundamental theme for the artist: the contemplation and fear of death.

Lazzarini’s multiplication of subjects, both within a single piece and across series, reflected his ongoing engagement with variation and repetition. This serial approach built an extended meditation on ideas. For him, Warhol served simultaneously as an influence and a point of departure.

The alteration between the legible and the confusing echoed a range of emotional states, from quiet reflection to panicked fear. Shifting back and forth between tangibly modeled forms and abstracted line, Lazzarini made connections between moments of quietude and violence.

Lazzarini first achieved notoriety with his installation of four skewed skulls in Bit Streams at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001 and payphone in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His first solo museum survey was exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2003. This presentation of drawings at Deitch Projects was an expanded version of Untitled -- Robert Lazzarini Works on Paper held at Davidson College earlier that spring. An accompanying catalog for that show included a conversation between Lazzarini and Chuck Close. A solo exhibition of Lazzarini’s sculpture went on view through July 16, 2006 at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, featuring a full-color catalogue with essays by Carla Hanzal, Joanna Marsh and Ian Berry.