Richard Pettibone at Leo Castelli
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Jonathan Gilmore
An omnivorous appropriationism defined this show of works by Richard Pettibone from the past 40-odd years: oil paintings and silkscreens that replicate and reconfigure artists such as Ingres, Eakins and Lichtenstein hung among those that reproduce imagery from celebrity trading cards, comic strips, pornography and hot-rod magazines. Such a grab bag of sources might suggest that, like the appropriation art of the 1980s, these works are meaningful less for their particular material and visual qualities than for their conceptual take on ideas of originality, singularity and marketability. But to treat these themes as paramount would be to miss the exquisite skill, wit and pop sensibility that Pettibone's work reveals.
Indeed, there is a delightful tension between the sense that when reproducing canonical works of others, any given image will do, and the recognition of the extraordinarily loving detail and painterly attentiveness that Pettibone's replicas evince. The fine dabs and fastidious brushwork of an old-master still life, for example, are employed to create tiny versions (1988-90) of pinstripe paintings by Frank Stella. Almost all the works here reproduce their originals in diminutive form--about the size of a magazine ad or smaller, in some cases--making the show look like a gallery of personal souvenirs and suggesting a notion of appropriation far from the denial of subjectivity associated with the standard model. Even a small photorealist oil painting (1975) of a beefy Brian Wilson with the singer's name attached in a glued-on label seems to be the product of a deeply devoted craft.
In several works, Pettibone engages with artists who themselves borrowed the imagery of others. Ugly Broken Nails (1970) takes up Roy Lichtenstein's style without any of his particular imagery, and Auto Crushes Paint Tube (1964), a roughly 4-by-5-inch oil on canvas, deploys the numbing visual reportage of Andy Warhol's disaster series for an event depicted with comic effect. Likewise, to each of several small oil paintings from his 1984 "347 Series" (the title refers to the number of retrospective works created in sequence in a seven-month period) that reproduce a Picasso etching, Pettibone appends not only blocky numerals, like those denoting plates in a catalogue raisonne, but also his own signature and, assertively and indiscriminately, several fingerprints in the oil. In effect, Pettibone has taken works that are already multiples, both as etchings and as continual reworkings of a core set of personal themes, and replicated them yet again--but as an aspect of his own identity, to which his signature and hand attest.
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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
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